Lieutenant Arkham: Elves and Bullets (11 page)

I wish I
could
go home, I think to myself while leaving
Cicisbeo
with the promise to only come back to set fire to it. The thing is, I really don’t like suffering at all, even if I was platonically attracted to certain devices the Brunette used with her clients before she left the business. And then, I’d need at least a whole day at home in my underpants on the sofa and in bed to get a proper rest. Which will never happen while all this is going on.

It’s time to confiscate something from my good friend Eton—dealers have to pay their taxes, too.

If it were me, I’d rename this place ‘Eton Square’, seeing as the half-ogre practically lives here. What’s more, the signs bearing the real name of the place have long since been nicked, seeing as some imbecile had the bright idea of using expensive mable to make them. Usually, the dealer hangs around under the street light that works, in full view of his clients.

Not tonight. The cone of light contains only a tramp, sat on the kerb, obsessively scratching, some bizarre withdrawal symptom. Just getting out of the car sends a searing pain down my back; I only hope I haven’t broken anything. I rip the cellophane off a new packet of cigarettes, and drop it on the ground along with the small piece of foil. The square is unnaturally quiet. Normally it’s packed with impatient consumers lying around along its walls, tramps and thugs who’ll cut throats for a few coins, pushers and slags.

Maybe there’s just been a raid. Or a showdown, but there are no dead bodies. In any case, there’s a menacing feel to this calm environment. If my back wasn’t hurting so much I’d go and look elsewhere, but seeing how things are, it’s worth asking the junkie crouched under the street light a few questions.

The echo of my shoes sounds sinister. When I get to the edge of the pool of light, the flea-ridden junkie jumps to his feet with a flash of hope. Momentarily, he stops scratching his arms which are already scarred from a long drug addiction and deep lacerations which are almost definitely self-inflicted.

“Eton?”

I take one more step, into the light. His enthusiasm fades instantly with the return of the rhythmic scraping of nails on flesh.

“I’m looking for him as well. Do you know if he’s coming?”

He shakes his head, and shifts the scratching to his back.

“Have you got anything, while we’re waiting?” He moves nearer.

“Keep your distance, fleabag.”

“Prick!”

He sits back down again, in a sulk. My cigarette is half-finished; I decide that I’ll wait until I get to the filter. Another drag. Someone’s coming out of the building, on my left. Someone very large indeed. Maybe it’s more a case of ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’. Noticing my interest in another area of the square, fleabag jumps to his feet again, trying to see if his own personal powder messiah has finally returned.

Three humanoid profiles, at least nine feet tall and stooping. They are using their freakishly-long arms to help themselves walk. The only sound they make, despite their size, is a long, drawn-out wheeze. I know what they are before they even get near the light. Trouble.

Oda. They come from the southern continent, hunchbacks from births, they get even more deformed as they age. Their legs are shorter than those belonging to a human, but their upper limbs almost touch the ground and end in six-fingered hands as big as anvils. Officially, these giants with skin as grey as rock, are classified as sentients, despite the fact that their appearance suggests quite the opposite. Greenish villi with a diameter of at least five centimetres hang down their gorilla-bodybuilder chests. Their eyes don’t have an iris, double eyelids like amphibians. But what really freaks me out about the way they look is their over-sized mouths, permanently wide open: because they don’t have a nose, Odas have to breathe through the mouth, this is what produces their characteristic wheeze. In the wild these beasts hunt in the savannah at night, combining good night vision with excellent skills of perception, meaning that they know exactly what is going on around them as far as five hundred metres away. I’ve always wondered if in the City these skills are impaired by traffic. There’s a hell of a difference between a clearing in the wild and a structure shaken by high winds and trodden by thirty million living beings, with their cars, factories and loud speakers.

There are two males, who luckily are wearing only partially ripped underpants, and a female with a swollen belly, adorned with coloured trinkets ‘round her neck and in that stuff resembling hair. Oda clans all work in the same way, at least that’s what people say who have found the desire and courage to study them (many have died, of course). Pregnant females almost always lead the community, while the males, only marginally more intelligent than lichen, take care of the hunting and defending their territory. A newborn Oda is, on average, 2’ 7” tall, but reaches a height of eight feet in a year. Because a female can give birth to four babies with each pregnancy, the first explorers who entered into contact with the clans of savages on the mainland of the southern continent wondered why these giants hadn’t spread as far as the coast, and entered into conflict with the throngs of kingdoms of dark-skinned humans along the coast. The reason for this? Simple, they’re cannibals. Their answer to any social dispute is to devour each other. A male at the top of the social structure is too old to defend himself from a younger male? The youngster eats him. Vice versa, an overly bold kid questions the authority of an adult? Gnom. A female doesn’t get pregnant fast enough after the last litter? Yum yum. Someone gets wounded during a hunting session? Second helpings for all. On the surface this looks like an effective system, based on discipline and a fast generational turnover. On the other hand, it doesn’t leave a great deal of room for learning and culture, which is still strictly tribal even amongst Odas who have made it, by means of systems unknown to the City.

“Ask… you… look for… Eton…”

The female is speaking, her voice is flat and punctuated with pauses that last forever. I interrogated an Oda once. It took me an hour only to find out that she didn’t know anything that was of any use to me. Talking together is an immense effort for them.

“I’m looking for him too!” exclaims the addict, scratching himself all the while. The Odas watch him, fluttering the membrane in their eyes and rhythmically inflating the two air sacs on their necks. The female croaks something, like a bull frog that’s just devoured the whole pond, crocodiles included. The three giants turn to face me.

“Ask… you… look…”

“Yes.” I nod, interrupting the excruciating of syllables. “I’m looking for Eton. Do you know where he is?”

I doubt that getting my badge out would do much good. They exchange a few croaky words in their incomprehensible language.

“Come…” the female says in the end, pointing at the place they came out of. Fleabag sets off enthusiastically, but the monsters stare at me when I don’t display the slightest inclination of moving.

“No, thanks. I just dropped by to say hello.” No fucking way am I going into a dark hole with them. Bet they want to play at ‘guess who’s coming to dinner’, I’ll willingly give up my place to the psycho with scabies.

“Come…” repeats the female, completely monotone as before.

The males are resting their hands on the ground. Shit. They’re getting ready to jump. From this distance they’ll flatten me like an empty can.

“Easy now, I’m with the Federal Guard. I’ll show you my badge.”

“What? Federal Guard?” The junkie’s alarmed. Slowly, I move my hand towards my badge, but the Odas mustn’t have understood me. The stunned words from the other poor bastard are the last thing I hear before a menhir of muscle performs an olympic leap and landing me with a punch to the head, I just keep on getting battered today without really knowing exactly why.

What a fuck-awful day.

I wake up to constant, agonising stabs of pain. It’s all dark. There’s a drums-only jam session inside my head, worthy of one of the worst hangovers of my life. Feeling around I realise that I’m surrounded by a series of vertical wooden bars. By following them I can confirm what I suspected: I’m in a cage. The different-sized planks seem to have been recycled; despite this they are effectively held together by some sort of string, it’s been knotted carefully. I could actually manage to untie it and escape but I think it would take hours. If I strain my ears I can make out a distant buzzing noise, this is overlaid with the now familiar incessant scratching of the junkie. I don’t want to attract his attention, but when I twist my body in the cramped cell, my body contorts painfully and I involuntarily produce a moan of suffering. Fleabag interrupts his otherwise relentless business and repeatedly interrogates the darkness. If the slight echo is anything to go by we’re imprisoned in a reasonably large space.

“Yes, I’m here,” I answer in the end, with a grimace.

“We’ve got to escape!”

Why do I only come across morons? Is it something in the water, has the whole city turned stupid?

“I suppose you’re in a cage, too.”

“A wooden cage, yessir. I can’t even stand up.”

“Marvelous. I reckon we’ve ended up in the pantry.”

“You mean they’re going to eat us?!”

I don’t answer him, and he starts snivelling. I proceed with the inventory, while my eyes adjust to the dark. They’ve taken my regulation gun, wallet, ID holder, cigarettes, lighter, keys, mobile phone and the fucking envelope, in other words everything except the only thing they couldn’t find. The Altra.

Nevertheless I check to see it’s still there, calling it from out of the dimensional pocket. It jumps into my hand, faithful as ever; holding it gives my morale a boost. One of the many runes engraved on the weapon gives it the priceless ability to disappear into another plane of existence together with its holder as soon as it’s put away. It’s more than ‘simple’ invisibility: it literally vanishes from this world, so no search or identification spell can find it. Only the person who placed it back in its holster can bring it back to this existence, meaning that if I were to die before managing to extract it, this unique firearm would be lost forever. It is a full optional piece, of course.

I run my fingers over the rune engraved on the tiny torch stowed away under the barrel, it activates immediately and projects a clear beam of light. I’m in a kind of cave, roughly hewn out of the concrete with basic tools, or maybe even the grey monsters’ bare hands. There are steel supports placed at regular intervals which connect the floor and the ceiling, the only bastion against the threat of collapse. Copious pools of some liquid or other take up most of the floor space, they correspond to the pipes which were severed during the building work. Clearly, I’m inside a layer between two levels, like the dog track. What with gangsters, gremlins and Odas busy transforming Nectropis into a piece of Gruyère cheese, I’m amazed the City hasn’t collapsed in on itself. It’ll surely happen sooner or later. Anyway, I’ve got more important things to worry about for the moment.

I carry on exploring, and come up against my companion in this unlucky adventure, who mutters something incomprehensible. As soon as the light hits him, he stops scratching to shield his eyes. His face has four red welts on his left cheek, the only one I can see. The junkie is having really bad withdrawal symptoms. Even his arms are dripping with sweat. Fleabag is literally falling apart with all the layers of skin he’s ripped off; never seen anything like it. I bet he can’t even stand up. On the left there’s a tunnel, the only visible way out from my position.

I turn the torch off in case I attract the attention of some disgusting beast and shoot at the bars where they meet at the top of the cage and replace the gun in its holster Another great feature of the Altra is that it doesn’t make a sound when it fires, so the only sound accompanying the bullets is that of splintering wood, which disperses amongst the myriad of squeaks and creaks in the surrounding environment. I could blow away the bars completely and go right now, but go where? Only the Gods know how far these tunnels extend. For all I know, I could be wandering for days in a maze of tunnels, before collapsing from exhaustion and getting myself devoured by a grey giant with the IQ of a stalactite. I need someone to guide me out of here. And to get me my stuff back. I check with my foot that the damaged bars are ready to be knocked out with a good kick, when the time comes. At first glance, the Odas probably won’t notice that the cage isn’t as solid as it should be. May the Pale take me if I have to give these overgrown toads my envelope and mobile phone with all those numbers on the memory card.

“Hey, fleabag,” I call into the darkness.

“Fimir,” fleabag protests from his cage.

“Fimir. I’ve got a plan as to how to escape from this place, but you’ve got to help me.”

“Great, mate. What do I have to do?”

“They’ll come sooner or later. You’ve got to attract their attention, Distract them.”

“No problem!” he exclaims, resuming his noisy self-quartering business.

Time passes, marked only by the rhythmic sound of lacerating human flesh and interrupted by the odd muffled whimper. As I gradually regain awareness, the pain increases, revealing fresh wounds and bruises. One of these is a nasty cut on my right eyebrow which needs at least four or five stitches. Clearly, Oda’s fist must have gotten me on the face, not on the head. Or, then again, maybe he just hit me all over, which is what logically happens when you’ve got a fist the size of a size fifteen ski boot. In fact, if that sledgehammer had hit me smack in the face I’d be writhing in the last throes of death, with half my face gone. But I’m not. They wanted to keep us alive. Why? Perhaps they prefer their food fresh. The TV documentary I saw about Odas didn’t explain this disturbing detail about the diet of these giant cannibals. An hour passes, or it could be ten minutes, when I reach the end of my tether and explode.

“Give that fucking scratching a rest, for fuck’s sake. You’ll bleed to death if you carry on like that.”

“Shit, cop, do you think I’m enjoying myself? I’m not, not one fucking bit. But I can’t help it.”