Immortal Lycanthropes (24 page)

At that moment my senses became clouded—or, better, overwhelmed. I was ready for it, of course, or thought I was, but it was still a bit of a surprise, the powerful emanation from the tube. It was the emanation of death, the stench emitted from the bones of an immortal when his life has fled. I had counted on this stench, when the time came, paralyzing my opponent, but Myron and Mignon Emanuel both turned their heads immediately toward me as, in a great rustling of tinfoil, I drew out of the tube the bones of a tiger’s forearm and front paw, bleached a beautiful white and bound together with silver wire. If Mignon Emanuel, still drawn up to her full height, paused a moment there, it was not from terror or surprise at the miasma that filled the spillway; it was rather from the paralysis that accompanies a sudden realization. What she had realized just then I do not pretend to know.

And the bones were moving. Theoretically, when I had practiced this maneuver, the strike came smoothly as I drew the skeletal arm from the tube, like a samurai’s quick-draw
iaijutsu
strike, but the tube had been shaken around so much, things had shifted around inside, and I bobbled the draw, and even dropped the tube. But I was committed, and I swung the bones forward, holding the elbow like a club.

Mignon Emanuel murmured, out loud, “So that’s where that went,” just as the five claws struck her throat. Very few things are sharper than a tiger’s claws, and Mignon Emanuel’s neck exploded in a spray of red. Her face darkened again, just before it blanched, and I worried for a moment that she would be able to turn into a bear before she died—bears, as everyone knows, can keep fighting and killing even after they die. But her eyes rolled back, and she flopped over onto the cement ground. In death, as we always do, she assumed her true form, and her clothing exploded into scraps. From a distance, the wind brought me the sound of Benson’s startled cry.

“Listen, kid, we’re in real danger, he’s going to open the floodgates,” I said rapidly as I knelt by her corpse and set to work. Suddenly a battery of sirens began to sound, making it even harder to think. With the razor-sharp claws of the immortal tiger I made a cut down the bear’s belly, from sternum to navel. The guts exploded outward in a disgusting mass, and I began shoveling them away.

Myron was still standing there, sniffling.

I had to shout. “If we get swept downstream, Benson will find us at the end, battered and torn, and finish us off.” I paused a moment. Benson might not be smart enough to search the secondary reservoir, but he was probably under orders from Mignon Emanuel, and he’d be able to follow orders. Also, Florence could be down there right now, ready to dive in the water and eviscerate the bloody remains of our bodies before we could even regain consciousness. The siren’s wailing could not cover up the great mechanical whirring up ahead. I unspooled the bear’s intestines faster.

“Kid, listen, you’ve got to get inside,” I said at last.

“What? No!”

“Fifty billion tons of water”—(I may have been exaggerating)—“are about to come down this chute. The insides of this bear are the only soft thing for miles.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and began to muscle him toward the bear’s corpse. It would have been difficult to actually force him in, but fortunately he relented and stuck his feet into the guts. At my instigation, he positioned himself so he was oriented in the opposite direction as the bear, his feet toward its head, and nestled himself lower and lower, slithering in backwards with his feet up inside the rib cage, until he was up to his shoulders in guts. He had somehow managed to wedge his duffle bag in there, too. The big holdup for him was getting his hands in—for some reason he didn’t want to do that part—but eventually he wriggled those in, too. I noticed that his head had stopped bleeding, but, of course, he now was almost completely covered in gore. I thought for a moment of turning back into a binturong and trying to worm in next to him, but, on careful consideration, I realized there would not be enough space, not with his bag in there, too, and there was no time to draw it back out.

“This is important,” I shouted at him, over the sirens and the clanking of chains, and—was that the rushing of water? “When your wild ride stops, you will still be in danger. Swim out as soon as you can, and run to the road. The road is south, you know which way is south?”

“The sun is on my left,” he said. The image must have reminded him of the terror of Mignon Emanuel standing in the rising sun five minutes ago, and he choked a little on the answer.

“Good. Don’t get caught, but if you get caught blame everything on me. I’ll wait for you in Reno for three days, and then I’ll head for Sacramento.”

“But how—” Myron started. Clearly he was worried about me.

I cut him off. “In the Del Paso Heights branch of the Sacramento Public Library, there’s a book on the care and feeding of binturongs. Inside that book, there’s an address—”

Some look in Myron’s eyes stopped me. “Why?” Myron asked, squirming in his mattress of blood. “Why are you doing this for me?”

I thought of Myron’s backpack, left in the back of Alice’s pickup truck so many months ago. “Because you liked my books,” I said. Because how could I tell him the real answer, that I envied the hell out of him? He was young—I don’t mean he was literally young, he was thousands of years old, just like the rest of us—but he was young because he had no past to haunt him. He didn’t have hundreds of murders on his conscience, he didn’t have the stupefying dullness of having seen and done everything already, so that even the promises offered by the new technologies of the future—faster cars and 3-D television—seemed like tedious variations on a tired theme. Envy was why the lion wanted to kill him, envy was why the bear wanted to use him. The memories of an endless childhood among the jungles, or the wastelands, or the savannahs, an endless childhood that finally ended, haunted us the way nostalgia haunts an old man, but our nostalgia cannot be ended by senility and a natural death. To see someone who returned, thanks to a lion’s claws passing through his brain, to the garden of that childhood—there was nothing more heartening and heartbreaking.

But there was no way to say all this. By now the roar of water was deafening. I picked up all the intestines I could in one armload and jammed them on top of Myron’s face, forcing his head down as deep into bear bowels as I could. “Watch out for the lion, the one to fear is the lion,” I shouted, perhaps futilely. Then the water was all around, and I had to leap for the side. Halfway through the leap, I turned into a binturong, and, my mass now a quarter of what it had been when I jumped, I was able to grab the side, and, my claws finding purchase in the small cracks, to scamper up it. My shaggy prehensile tail got wet.

The last thing I noticed about Myron’s makeshift escape pod, as it raced down the river, was that in death Mignon Emanuel reclaimed the aura she had lost in life. I could feel the presence of her corpse behind me as it sailed downstream, and out of range.

The man who will wantonly kill a poor brute for sport will think little of murdering a fellow-creature. Now, boys, we have but one chance left—the Diamond Cave.

R. M. Ballantyne,
The Coral Island

I will never really be certain of what happened next. I didn’t see Myron again, and although Alice did, it was only for a short while, and she didn’t get the details. Certainly he escaped. I escaped, too, and my pursuit across the desert by Benson (which included a thrilling scene of two naked men climbing the reservoir’s control station and more than three carjackings) was harrowing enough to fill a chapter of its own. Let us assume Myron’s was equally exciting.

His next actions can only be pieced together in retrospect, and after much research. He had no money, nothing but the meager contents of his duffle bag. He was covered in the guts of a bear. He looked like Myron. Everything was against him.

It appears from eyewitness accounts that he probably worked in a carnival in or around Medford, Oregon. He had almost certainly read
Toby Tyler: or, Ten Weeks with a Circus,
and the idea doubtless appealed to him. But how he found his way to Oregon in the first place is more speculative. There were sightings at a cockfight in Redding, California, and at a UFO convention in Susanville. Several witnesses insisted they saw Myron collecting tickets at a wax museum in Lovelock, Nevada, which is frankly pretty far out of his way, and their testimony may be discounted by the incredulous.

However he got there, it was almost May before Myron reached Portland. He came in on foot, with the sun rising directly behind him. His clothes were tattered; a huge backpack was on his back. A scarf draped loosely around his face concealed his features. The town was just waking up. Myron climbed the stairs to the Broadway Bridge, its passenger walkway separated from the whizzing cars by a low metal fence. Portland is the crown jewel in the kingdom of vagabonds, and by vagabonds I mean nothing more romantic than homeless drug addicts and the mentally ill. On the bridge, Myron was just one itinerant among many, for here several dozen had decided to spend the night. Each of them had a huge backpack, and they were sleepily getting up to face the day. And then, as Myron watched, they began to jump up and run, run toward him. He was jostled back and forth by the crowd until he got thrown against the railing, and, gazing through the bars down at the Willamette River below, he held his place in relative comfort while the human tide passed. And when they had passed, and he looked ahead on the bridge, he saw what everyone had been running from. There was an Indian man, his rags and his enormous backpack no different from anyone else’s, except that he had in his hands a bow. A quiver of arrows was attached to his belt, the cap off and dangling from a string. One arrow he had already nocked, and it glowed with an eerie bluish light. It was not one of the Nine Unknown Men, but it was an employee of the Nine Unknown Men, and he knew just enough of things to be dangerous. Dantaghata.

The only witnesses to the following events, except for Myron and his nemesis, were those few beggars who had huffed too much paint the night before to be able to stand this morning. These are not the most creditable of witnesses, and yet by triangulating their stories we may be able to reach something close to a true account of the events of that morning. Surely it is plausible that at the moment Myron sighed and said, “Look. Look. I’m sorry I beat you.”

“You didn’t beat me,
moron,
” the Indian man spat out. “You beat my brother.”

“Your bother?”

“My twin brother. Did you think I was chasing you across the country just because I lost some silly game to you? You really are stupid.”

“Your twin brother?” Myron said. “You mean you’re not Dantaghata?”

“Of course I’m Dantaghata, you nitwit. Who else could I be? My brother died in the West Village, gunned down thanks to your monkeyshines.”

Myron was beginning to get a little flustered from the constant stream of insults. “You’re after me because you think I killed your brother? I didn’t even kill him.”

“Try to listen to what I say, you ugly retard,” Dantaghata said. “I didn’t say you killed him, just that you caused him to die. You lured him to his death, and so it’s your fault.”

“I didn’t even know he was dead! Why aren’t you going after the Illuminati?”

“You must think I’m crazy. Attack the Illuminati? Are you trying to kill me? They’re the
Illuminati!
”

“They were at the conference you busted up. Why didn’t you go after them then?”

For a moment Dantaghata’s face became a mask of absolute terror. “They were there?” he managed to stammer out. But he shrugged it off. “That’s all in the past. I’ve tracked you from coast to coast, and I’ve brought with me the Pashupatastra.” He flexed his bow, and the arrow’s blue light flared and dimmed. “When this arrow strikes, it unmakes not only this universe, but also the next two universes to be created in the future. Lord Rama disdained to use it, but I am not about to be talked out of things as easily, you stain.”

Myron looked to his right and left for an avenue of escape. The fence along both sides would not have been much of an obstacle to anyone, say, five feet tall. The only way Myron could go was straight back, which didn’t seem like a good idea.

“I really don’t want to die,” Myron said.

“Boo hoo hoo. We don’t always get what we want.”

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to unmake the whole universe just to get me?”

“Am I sure? Are you kidding? Of course I’m sure!”

Myron probably looked sad at that moment.

“Any last words?” Dantaghata said, testing his pull one last time. “Before I kill you, I mean, loser.”

“As a matter of fact . . .”

Witnesses were unable to report with any degree of accuracy, so greatly were they swooning just then, what Myron’s words were, but I feel safe making the assumption that they were in the neighborhood of: “Pax sax sarax . . .”

Dantaghata fell sideways against the railings; then his legs gave way, and he hit the ground. His bow and arrow clattered around him, and his quiver spilled out as well, arrows everywhere. According to one witness, a teenage runaway with high hopes (as they all have) who had ended up six months later addicted to compressed air and half insane (as they all are) on the bridge—but who was fortuitously out of earshot—Myron ran forward immediately to grab the archer’s weapons, but his foot, in his excitement, hit the bow, and it skidded under the railing and over the side of the bridge, to the river below. Myron went to pick up the blue glowing arrow, but none of them were blue and glowing at that moment, and whatever eldritch symbols had been carved in the wood Myron could not read, so as Dantaghata began to stir, he grabbed an arrow at random and ran ahead, past him some space. By the time Dantaghata had struggled to his feet, Myron had fished his own little battered compound bow from his backpack. The arrow, when he nocked it, was comically overlong for the tiny bow.