Jabberwock Jack (8 page)

"What the fuck are you doing with Chad?"

I looked to my left to see a group of men lingering by the entrance to the alley. Baseball caps with Greek letters, Avalon U shirts, sunglasses tucked into their collars, and oh God, the cargo pants! Too similarly dressed to our unconscious frat boy, or as we now knew him, Chad, for this to be a coincidence. These were his friends.

Shit.

I now understood. Chad hadn't come into a bar alone to pick a fight like a reckless idiot. Chad had come in to pick a fight and lure his opponent outside so that his friends could gang up on their victim and kick the poor bastard's ass. Chad was an even bigger piece of shit that I had originally thought. A coward
and
a jackass. What the fuck was happening in our town? What had happened to New Avalon that there were people that thought this was reasonable behavior? At least monsters had a reason for what they did. They're
monsters
. Chad had no excuse besides being a terrible human being.

As we straightened up, the group of Chad's friends understood the situation. Chad was plainly out. But rather than backing off, they were coming toward us, maybe a bit more warily than before. There were four of them. Chad had been hoping for a five-on-one fight. That made me angry. I wasn't going to run from this one. Someone needed to teach those guys a lesson. I cracked my knuckles and got ready. Next to me, Lem nodded. Not typically one for pointless fights, he understood well the situation and he was unhappy with it too. To my other side was Szandor. He might be drunk, but I could rely on him in a fight. His instincts were concentrated in every muscle memory and tendon after years of killing monsters. And he was always up for a skirmish, even if he knew he couldn't kill these particular foes. Three on four - not a fair fight, but I thought the odds were in our favor.

I heard the bar door open, as Dickie came to check on us. His first reaction seeing the rapidly approaching frat boy gang was, "Well, shit." He shook his head. But then he moved next to us, his stance widening. He would stand with his friends.

Four on four now.

There was a moment of uncertainty among the frat boys. Two turned and looked at their friends, unsure if they were going through with this. They hadn't signed up for a fair fight. They had wanted to prey on the weak. Suddenly the weak were fighting back and it didn't seem like fun anymore. But their friends didn't pause. They were already in the rage of battle. So the two nervous ones doubled down with peer pressure. For better or worse, they were doing this and so were we.

I'd like to say it was some epic clash of battles like in the movies. Pike men and foot soldiers, barbarians and knights, a clash of arms and armor, a thousand ugly sounds arising from massive tides of men and metal thudding against each other in a murderous wave. But no, this was just eight men in a petty squabble using their fists to settle it. There were shouts and growls as we closed on each other, rushing for the first hit but knowing that it was the last hit that counted.

I shouted as I threw a punch. Time to make this hurt.

King Contrary Man

When we got in Meat's SUV the next day, he looked at our bruises and shook his head. Szandor had a busted lip from where a punch hit his lip piercing hard. My cheek was cut and I had some clear medical tape over it; one of our opponents had worn a ring. What other rewards we had from the night before were covered by our clothes and only revealed by a slight stiffness in our walk. Monsters had given us far worse injuries. We could walk off cuts and bruises.

"Tell me those wounds are from hunting," said Meat, but his voice was resigned to the probable truth. He knew that face bruises were unlikely caused by monsters that tend to bite and slash.

"You should see the other guys," said Szandor with a smile from the back seat.

"We just had a bad night," I said. "Let's just leave it there."

Meat shook his head again and the SUV slid off the curb. It was another rainy day in New Avalon. Not quite a heavy downpour like we had been having recently; this was a much lighter rain. But it had been going all morning, leaving the streets soaked and wet. Pedestrians huddled under awnings and umbrellas as Meat's SUV made its way north to Asher. This neighborhood was on the northeast side of New Avalon. In some ways, it was only a little better than Egan. Rents were low, crime was high, the buildings in need of repair. With people needing to move out of North Egan, this is another place I expected them to move. Not a lot of options if they wanted to keep the same rents. Many would need to move out of town entirely. I'd about had it with gentrification.

While South Egan was primarily residential, Asher was more mixed use. Besides the old apartment buildings, there were small warehouses, a few factories, and a large amount of ethnic businesses. In particular, Asher was a great place to eat non-American food without killing your wallet, like you might in Midtown. An ex had introduced me to this hole in the wall Ethiopian restaurant in Asher that I had so far been unable to convince Szandor to go to. He makes fun of me for eating Hot Pockets, but he lacks an adventurous stomach himself. Go figure.

We parked in front of a warehouse that seemed even more broken down than the rest. The windows were intact, but the outside walls were covered with graffiti and stained with decades' worth of dirt and rain. Gutters and bars on the windows were crusted with a bright orange rust. Some might say this building had character, but the character I was seeing was that this warehouse was the building equivalent of homeless.

Meat knocked on the metal of the rollup steel door that covered the garage entrance. There was a pause, and I can't tell if there was a window they looked out or we had a camera on us I couldn't see, but the automatic door started opening. Once it was up, we stepped into the warehouse, the door descending behind us. Despite the dirty and rundown exterior, the inside was in better shape. Oh, the floor was still just concrete that was cracked in a few places, the walls were peeling, and I could hear that somewhere in the warehouse they had a roof leak dripping into a bucket, but someone had done something with the place. I saw a few desks with computers, two boards covered with scribbled plans and posted maps, a large meeting table, a kitchen, and stairs leading somewhere upstairs. At the edges of the wide open area in the center of the small warehouse I saw hanging weapons, bins full of more weapons, and gear lockers. Mats were down in the central area, making me think it was a sparring circle. Nothing was high class, everything looked temporary and thrown together, but otherwise someone had turned this building into a hunter headquarters. I was impressed.

We were alone in this large area for just a moment before someone came down the stairs. I heard him before I saw him because of his limp. Once he arrived down the stairs, I could see that across a level surface he hid his limp well. Had I not heard the off-cadence limp on the stairs I would not have examined his legs closer. But his left leg was stiffer than the other and it seemed to hit the floor with a lot more weight.

He greeted Meat with as close to a smile as this serious man got and then he was introduced to us. His name was Jericho. Before anything else you could say about him, you need to understand he was intense. Dark eyes that bore into you. A face that was always serious, smiles traded in for scowls. There was just a feeling of intensity around him. It was in the air near him, as if sparks leapt off his body. His skin was dark, nearly ebony. His hair was short with patches of gray and he had a well-trimmed beard. A scar traveled a short distance along the left side of his jaw. He was very likely in his fifties but rather than being in poor shape, he seemed fitter than men half his age. His six foot two inch height rose above both my brother's five foot eight inch height and even my own six foot form. It goes without saying that my first impression was that he was one of the most badass people I had ever met and I would have no shame admitting he could probably kick my ass in a fair fight.

He wore a long black coat, either leather or fake leather, which added to his badassness. His legs were covered in black leather pants that ended in boots. Without even being conscious of it, I found myself looking down his left leg and seeing just a tiny glint of Avalon Brass between the boot and his pants. When my vision rose from that, I saw that he had seen me look. His own expression was challenging, as if daring me to say something, an utterance I would make at my own risk. I said nothing.

Jericho looked Szandor and I over. "This is it, then? Two boys?" he said to Meat, not us. There was a tone in his voice that was not an American accent. I wanted to say British, but I really wasn't sure. It was the squashed dialect of a man who had come to America decades ago and had a speaking habit or two that they had not yet given up despite the years.

"Best of the new generation," said Meat. I had no idea if Meat knew any other hunters in the area around our age. If he did, he had never told us about them.

"A bit scrawny, I think," said Jericho.

"Well, fuck you too," said Szandor.

Jericho was in front of Szandor in a second, his form towering over my brother. He didn't touch Szandor, but his presence seemed to almost throw a punch, as I saw my brother flinch. "Do we have a problem here, boy?"

"Oh, hey, you
can
talk directly to us," said Szandor, maybe a little less confidently than he hoped. "I was wondering if we were invisible or something. Or maybe you were deaf. Or deaf
and
stupid. Wait, stupid's not the word for it. What was it? Oh yeah, it was dumb. So I was wondering if you were dumb. Really dumb. Oh wait, you've been talking, dumb can't be right. So I guess I was right the first time. Stupid!"

Jericho's face tensed, one of his eyes almost squeezing closed in tension. Then his face relaxed. He let out a laugh. It was a throaty laugh, but it felt to me that it wasn't a happy laugh. It was too tense, too rough. It was a laugh that came from a deep place of desolation. It was a laugh trying to fit into a world that it didn't belong to.

He turned to Meat, his stern face almost cracked with vague amusement. "They have balls."

Meat grimaced and sighed. "Cowardice is not really a trait either of them have. Nor tact, for that matter."

"True, but courage is a trait I need, you know this. Frozen men are dead men," said Jericho. He turned back to us. "I hear you two boys faced down a fearsome beast underneath the city. One with a great big red eye and a white snake body."

"Yes," I said, nodding.

"It wasn't so bad," lied Szandor.

"It's impressive you survived, even more so unharmed," he said appraisingly. "Tell me about it. I've heard most of the details from Meat, but I want to hear it from you. Tell me everything about the beast."

I looked to Szandor, who nodded that I could tell it. I recounted the story, focusing on the monster details and the location.

Afterward Jericho nodded. "As I had suspected. My time here is not wasted. There is no doubt that it is the beast. It is Jabberwock Jack." He said the name with a combination of hatred, respect, and pain.

"He hates when you call him that," said a voice from the bottom of the steps. I swung my head to see a woman standing there. I was surprised that she had come down them without any of us noticing. With how loudly Jericho had come down the stairs, I expected them to make a bunch of noise when anyone came down them. Yet she had made no noise that I noticed. Sure, we were all talking and that was distracting, but my hearing is usually on alert for movement in enclosed spaces. It's an occupational skill.

"He and I share enough hate," said Jericho, "that misnaming him is just a drop of spite in an overflowing bucket."

The woman slinked her way over to us. There was something very smooth in her movements, like a forest predator or a dancer. She was thin, her form lithe; she was maybe five foot nothing. She wore ripped jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt that was too long, so the sleeves stretched past her hands. She had the darkest eye makeup I had seen outside a dance club. That first made me think she was our age, but as I took in the rest of her face, I realized she was older than us, but at best in her very early thirties. There were feathers in her dark hair and a wreath of necklaces the dangled on her chest - crystals, more feathers, amulets, and at least one medicine pouch. Based on her skin, I couldn't guess her background - something in me wanted to say she was Native American, maybe a holdout from the Appaquagh tribe that was once local to New Avalon, but there was something different, almost Asian, mixed in with her features. Of course, I could be completely wrong. And maybe she was just trying to suggest Native American with her necklaces. It was very possible that she had no authentic claim, just the one-sixteenth Cherokee I had so often heard in bars.

"When you are in each other's orbits, even the smallest change can alter the winds and the tides," she said mysteriously. "Disrespect and hatred are deep rivers, but the flow of any stream can be changed."

Szandor turned to me with a look and movement of his hands that said
What's up with this bullshit?

But at least one person took her words seriously. Jericho's face changed. "In his orbit? Then he is close! You're sure?" His voice was frantic and needy, his eyes wide and bloodshot.

The woman smiled wanly and shook her head, her eyes nearly closing in the gesture. It would almost be cute if it wasn't in the context of so much weird. "Unclear. He may be close, he may be far. He may be running silent and deep, just to arise suddenly. A vast moon coming over the horizon, far too close, far too large, but the tides will change."

"The fuck?" said Szandor. "That didn't make any sense." I agreed with my brother but said nothing.

"Fala is... uh, an advisor," said Meat. He seemed to not be comfortable with that statement.

"She is our best expert on Jack's behavior and history," said Jericho confidently. He had been calmed from his outburst by her crazy words. She was like the Obsessive Whisperer. "I trust her completely when it comes to this beast."