Gypsy Blood (41 page)

Carnival could see what was happening.

The Red Shambler was trying to suck up the Aggregate, to inhale it in a kind of occupational osmosis, possessing, like the straw becoming soda pop. He could feel the beast whispering wetly through the dead ends and the broken doors and the hungry alleys of the city itself and something inside him told him that the Shambler was determined to take over the entire city.

To breathe it in and swallow and digest it and it wouldn’t stop there.

It wanted everything.

Carnival saw it, like a vision from Hell. Like a bastard marrying into a family tree, the Red Shambler was figuring on taking over the world, one city at a time.

“We’ve got to stop it!” Carnival shouted.

“We can do it,” Carlos said.

Carnival was waiting for the little man to pull out a set of cheerleading pom-poms, but before he got a step further the Red Shambler turned and stomped Carlos flat, just as he was about to chuck another futile hand grenade.

The grenade blast went off beneath what Carnival guessed to be the red beast’s heavy paw or at the very least some kind of semi-supporting pseudopod. Carnival spitefully prayed that the grenade had given the Red Shambler a terminal case of cosmic athlete’s foot.

Carnival kept on swinging the two-by-four but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. He should have brought more magic. He kept trying to think up some kind of fantastic spell. What would Mandrake the Magician do right now? Probably gesture hypnotically and make the Shambler think it was nothing more than an impacted boil, which was almost what it looked like.

“We are absolutely fucked,” Carnival said out loud.

And that’s right when Maya appeared, hurtling down from the evening sky like a kamikaze death bat.

“Yes,” Carnival shouted. “Get the bastard.”

He wasn’t sure what she could do to the brute, but she sure seemed to know what she was doing, and they could use all the help they could get. The Magnificent Seven had jellied down into a puddle of Marx Brothers, just that quickly.

The Red Shambler whirled about like a sumo wrestler suddenly sprouting ballet slippers and tumbleweed toes, knocking Tupo into the water and right out of the game.

The quiet little man didn’t even have a chance to say “Oof”.

Chollo made up for the big man’s silenced adios, cursing and trying to reload all three shotguns at the same time, making nearly as much noise in their unloaded state as they had while they were firing.

Carnival kept swinging his two by four. He knew it wasn’t doing any real damage. It just felt good to do something.

“Get the bastard,” Carnival shouted again. “Kill the fucking great red eyesore.”

Chollo didn’t seem to be listening. He dropped his shotgun and ran for cover, headed for the street.

Shit. Carnival had never seen the big man run from anything before now.

Your friend has developed a coward’s sense of priority.

“Poppa?”

I wouldn’t leave my boy alone at a time like this. Too bad your pet thug doesn’t share my loyalty.

Carnival supposed he couldn’t blame Chollo. It was up to him and Maya right now. He could see her buzzing about the Shambler’s topside, like a beautiful mosquito whirling about the world’s largest nuclear booger.

The Red Shambler turned toward Carnival, standing there all alone with his ridiculous two by four, a gone-to-seed David with a sadly busted slingshot.

“You are alone, Gypsy,” the Shambler said, it’s voice rumbling and rupturing from a half a hundred mouths and most of them full of brick and window glass.

You were never alone my son.

Carnival felt his Poppa moving through his body, taking hold and control. No, not taking control, but standing with his son, the two of them, father and boy finally standing together.

He felt something like a soft wet tickle in the back of his throat. He reached for it and felt the touch of something sleek.

A scarf.

Fight him like a Gypsy, boy. Fight him like the Rom you finally are.

Carnival pulled the scarf out of his own mouth like a long wet chain, like some crazy street magician frantically trying to wow the crowd with one last big stunt, looping it lariat-style over his head and throwing it, the scarf running like a cobra on high-tension barbiturate, streaking and greasing and ripping into the inner working guts of the super-nuclear booger monster – the Red Shambler.

Now it was out of his hands and Carnival could only stand there, braced as the scarf ran from his mouth and into the Red Shambler’s wet inner workings.

The Shambler didn’t even flinch.

“You can’t kill me,” roared the Red Shambler, or he might have been whispering, it was hard to tell. “I am blood and pain and destruction. I am a god and Hell, all in one.”

He gestured towards Maya.

“Take him, daughter,” he said. “Kill the gypsy for me.”

Maya swooped straight down toward Carnival.

“Oh hell,” Carnival mouthed around the running mouthful of scarf.

Blood will out, every time boy.

She was hurtling straight towards him.

“Yeah!” shouted a rough voice from out of the darkness.

Carnival looked around.

He couldn’t believe what he saw.

Here came Chollo, charging the Red Shambler with the propane-loaded rickshaw rolling out in front of him like a kamikaze balsa wood wheelbarrow.

“If love be rough with you, be rough with love!” the big man shouted as the rickshaw smashed up against one of the Red Shambler’s many red scaled booger-blubber pseudo-legs. Chollo yanked the detonator and dove headlong toward the dirty harbor water.

Maya scooped Carnival up and suddenly he was airborne the scarf tailing out behind him like a long kite string.

The tank exploded and everything went red.

Unexpected Redemption

A
n instant later Carnival opened his eyes. The explosion had cleared everything. He didn’t know how he’d survived. There was no sign of Chollo, Tupo, Momma or Maya.

The Red Shambler stood over him, bigger than death and twice as dangerous.

At least he looked a little less booger-like.

Right now he just looked like a hyper-thyroidal love-spawn of a sumo wrestler and Fat Bastard, poured out of clotted mess of tomato aspic and lime green
Jell-o
. He could see the scarf twisted through the Shambler’s inner workings like a red marker tracing of the way through a garden maze. An end of the scarf tattered out like the last banner over a fallen Foreign Legion fort, long after the last sergeant and propped the last rifle beside the last dead legionnaire’s corpse.

The Shambler was smiling, kind of like Buddha with acid indigestion. Carnival wondered if the old god was mellowing with age.

Carnival didn’t know how the Red Shambler had survived. He could see pieces of the Aggregate clinging to his hide. Maybe the Aggregate had soaked up the blast. Maybe the Red Shambler had sucked the city familiar up entirely, or done enough damage to chase it off Maybe that’s what had protected him from Chollo’s rickshaw blast.

Carnival couldn’t say for sure.

Things were happening way too fast.

The big bastard looked down at him. Carnival didn’t know if he remembered anything about that golden leash chain. He didn’t know if that was all Cantanker or if the Red Shambler had switched places in mid slavery. He couldn’t tell how much the old god knew about what had been done to him in the past.

But he sure looked pissed.

Carnival was a lowly
hors d`oeuvre
about to be rendered
hors de combat
. That’s fancy French for he was fucked, seventeen ways to sundown.

And then all at once his rescuer appeared.

A small figure that looked no bigger than a firefly, next to that big red rock-eating monster. Maya buzzed the Red Shambler’s head, like Tinkerbell flying interference on a heavily laden Captain Hook, and Robin Williams was nowhere in sight.

The Shambler almost had her twice.

Carnival threw himself on the big bastard. He grabbed hold of what looked like a heel, and tried to drag the big bastard down.

He might as well try to body slam a mammoth.

Then the Red Shambler had her.

Damn it.

Carnival redoubled his efforts.

The mammoth didn’t grow any smaller.

The Red Shambler latched onto Maya with one of his great hairy suckers. He leaned back and inhaled. She paled like she was fading away. He wasn’t just sucking her blood. He was draining her essence.

“Maya,” Carnival shouted.

He might as well have been yelling at a distant star.

He drew her in but it was a battle. The nightwalker would not die. She pulled herself grimly down his long leg, fighting for every inch. Carnival reached up to her, sending her what he could.

He felt Momma inside him, even felt Poppa, reaching out to her. Sending the strength of a million long lost Rom into her being.

Try boy!

He didn’t know whether that did the trick, or whether that was just wishful thinking, but Maya found the strength to drag herself inch by painful inch as he sucked her every drag of the way, down towards the distant water.

It was no good. He couldn’t reach her.

Stand aside, boy. Let your Poppa drive.

“Drive this, Poppa,” Carnival rasped, reaching within himself for the strength, reaching out for Maya’s hand.

“MAYA!” Carnival yelled.

She heard him, and reached harder.

Carnival caught her hand.

She was holding something.

He felt the tattered end of the scarf.

Maya pushed the red scarf into his hand.

“Touch the water,” she pleaded.

Carnival looked at her, half confused.

“Touch the sea-water,” she screamed.

Carnival reached out and dangled a foot into the advancing tide. And then Maya sucked in, drawing the ocean through Carnival, up through herself, and up into the Red Shambler.

That’s the thing about vampires.

They sucked.

And being bit by a vampire and touching her now made Carnival a part of the blow job of the century. He felt himself grow loose and liquidish as the waters of the
Atlantic Ocean
flowed through his aching veins.

Maya kept on sucking.

The Red Shambler got larger and thirstier. He’d already inhaled half a city. Now he was taking in an ocean on top of that.

Urban developers have a phrase for it.

They call it over expansion, getting too large for one’s own good.

Carnival could see his fat red cells looming as large as voluptuous vampiric Volkswagens, humping and bumping one upon the other, like a thousand Eschers on an ocean of bad acid. The ocean shrunk. The harbor looked like a frog pond. Carnival saw bodies down in the muck. Concrete overshoes and men wrapped in chains. Abandoned pirates and fallen fishermen. It looked like a discotheque of the dead and damned. Men lay down or swept in from a thousand leagues of sea. Twisting and moving and being sucked into the huge red vacuum.

And the great beast kept growing huge and fat and turgid.

Carnival reached into his pocket with his one free hand. He didn’t know why. Maybe Poppa told him to do it. There, in his pocket was the tattooist’s needle. Carnival reached up and poked the Red Shambler with it. Poked him in the ankle, like Talos, bursting the over stressed cell walls.

Like a hundred ruptured
Amsterdam
dikes, it all came flowing out.

But that wasn’t enough. He kept sucking that up. I thought he would burst but even that wasn’t enough.

How big could he grow?

Just then Carnival felt something hard and long pushing against him. He turned around. Olaf stared him right in the face, his turgid death-cock shoving hard against Carnival’s leg. The chair bound corpse had a knife in his hand, reaching out for Carnival’s throat.

“Well bugger me,” Carnival whispered, but he didn’t really mean it.

Olaf grabbed him. Suddenly Carnival was simultaneously fighting for his life and his anal virginity, and he couldn’t be certain which concerned him more.

He saw the Red Shambler high above him, pulling himself back together.

“Olaf, you’ve got to stop it.”

But Olaf wasn’t listening.

“He wants the world,” Carnival told Olaf. “It’s bigger than both of us. We’ve got to stop him.”

“Fuck the world,” Olaf swore.

He meant it. His cock was huge and engorged. He’s thinking with the little head and not with the big. Only the little head isn’t all that small. If he has his way he’s going to tear Carnival a new borehole the diameter of the Brooklyn Tunnel.