Malus Domestica (66 page)

“Beast mode.”

“Speaking of beasts,” said Sara Amundson, as Wayne led the others out the back, “I’ll stay here and give you a hand, if that’s okay. I’ll make a monster.”

Joel shrugged. “If you—”

CRASH!
The front door imploded. Joel and Sara ducked down behind the shelves.

The rich, buttery stink of gunpowder mixed with the feeble vanilla funk of old comic books. Euchiss stooped underneath the mullion that ran through the middle of the door, passing through the gap where the pane of glass had been. Glittering grit crunched under his bootsoles.

When he stood up, Joel grimaced. Up close, Roy Euchiss looked horrendous.

His ears had deteriorated, leaving ragged stumps of raw skin, edged in black. Two gaping Boris Karloff
Phantom of the Opera
nostrils marked where his nose had melted, and one of his eyes was a milky cataract. The skin all over him was red and peeling like an all-day sunburn. He looked like a bratwurst that’d been on the grill too long.

Euchiss racked the bolt on his rifle, so pissed he was shaking. An empty brass casing flipped out and tinkled across the glass sales counter.
“Where the fuck are you, ya brother-killin’ porch monkey son of a bitch!”
he bellowed, the words leaving him in a wrathful shiver.

“Y’all killed my brother first, motherf—” Joel yelled, anger stripping him of self-control, and he knew it was a mistake as soon as
brother
passed through his lips.

Euchiss’s head jerked in his direction and he shouldered the rifle. Joel snatched himself away; a box exploded above his head, peppering him with bits of plastic and paper.

Stomp, stomp, stomp. Here comes the gunman, racking the bolt. Euchiss stormed down to where Joel had been hiding, looked up, saw him crouch-running around the other end, and fired at him.

BOOM!
A
Walking Dead
coffee mug shattered.

Joel scrambled across the aisles of toys and games. The rifle coughed fire again,
BOOM!,
and a hole appeared in a M
ONOPOLY
! box behind him. He turtle-crawled as quietly as he could, trying to put as much space between him and that gun as possible.

His shoulder bumped into a knee and he found himself looking up into the telescoping jaws of an alien. Joel almost screamed until he realized it was Fisher’s replica Xenomorph statue.

Outside, someone shouted through a loudspeaker.
“Attention! This is the Blackfield Police! You are ordered to disperse!”

The cops? Joel crept behind the Alien statue. Had the cops come to put the hurt on the mob out there? The crowd became chaotic, screaming and angry. Footsteps raced past the broken front door, and he could hear the familiars snarling ferally.

“Get your asses outta here!”
continued the bullhorn warning.
“Right—”

It was cut off by the hollow slap of gunfire.

“You might as well stop running,” warned Euchiss, turning and striding back the way he came, following the sound of Joel scuffling against the carpet. He racked the bolt, loading a fresh round.

Boxes throughout the comic shop began to blow open by themselves in shreds of cardstock, one or two at first, like the first kernels of popcorn in the bag.

Euchiss stopped to look around in confused surprise.

They were all cracking open in a percussive symphony,
POP-POP-POP!
Action figures tumbled to the floor in a rain of plastic arms and legs.

“What kind of trick is
this
shit?” Euchiss asked the shadows. “Let me guess, here’s the twist: you’re some kind of Negro hoo-doo magician descended from Haitians or Jamaicans or somethin, right? Ain’t that how these things always go? I watch movies when I ain’t cuttin throats, you know. I ain’t
completely
uncivilized yet.”

Something brushed Joel’s ankle. A tiny plastic superhero scuttled under a shelf.

Another miniature man slid past, and another. The floor was suddenly an ant-like armada of action figures, all tumbling and rolling toward the other end of the sales floor.

Euchiss opened his bolt, checked it, slammed it home again. “Well listen here, Afro-cadabra: you ain’t got
nothin
on Miss Cutty, I can tell you that. She got more magic in her pinkie finger than in
all
your queer little body.”

“You’ll never win, Red Skull,” said a tinny voice.

As if by instinct, Euchiss spun and fired at it.
BOOM!

Captain America flipped ass over teakettle into the shadows. “I am vengeance!” said another voice, behind him. “I am the night!” Others chimed in, growing into a cacophony of chirping battle cries:

“This is where it ends, Skeletor!”

“Thundercats, Thundercats, Thundercats,
hooooo!”

“Transformers! More than meets the eye!”

Soon the voice-chip recordings of dozens,
hundreds
of action figures swelled into a singular angry robot chorus, a dissonant and anticipating pitchfork mob. Vibrations welled in the floor, radiating from some ponderous epicenter in the middle of the shop, a rumble that rose and opened into a slow roar.

Euchiss recoiled, wheeling on the source of the noise.

Rising from between the racks was a great hillock of jack-shapes, a head and shoulders and then a towering manycolored gestalt, five feet, six feet, seven feet tall, a Grendel made of action figures.

It lurched down the aisle toward him on two swimmy elephant feet as if it were wading in deep mud, the soft light glistening on shins and biceps. Sightless electric eyes winked all over, red and green laser-dots flashing and flickering like Christmas lights. The synthetic bravado of battery-operated ray-guns and lightsabers hissed and whizzed from deep inside:
pew pew pew! Bzzzz-bkow! Boom!
Bling-bling-bling!
The dwindling electronic
eeeeewwwww…BKSSHH
of a blockbuster bomb.

“SURRENDER,” chorused the toy-monster, “OR DIE.”

Euchiss made a face, wincing almost in embarrassment. “Is this supposta
scare
me, pizza-man?”

Joel stepped from behind a shelf and swung the Batdazzler up into the front of the rifle, shattering every finger-bone in Euchiss’s left hand. Fake diamonds broke loose, glittering across the carpet.

The Serpent’s right hand impulsively pulled the trigger,
POW!,
tearing through boxes of toys, and he screamed in pain and rage. The rifle’s muzzle dropped to the carpet.

Joel raised the glorious baseball bat.

“Nope.
Distract
you,” he said, and brought it down in the middle of the gunman’s forehead.

Euchiss’s skull cracked and his head snapped back; the impact jolted Joel’s forearms, numbing his hands. Euchiss backpedaled, collapsing against a shelf, and the whole thing toppled over in a spill of sleeved comics.

Joel lunged in and hammered him across the chest before he could get up. Ribs gave way underneath with a muffled, delicate crunch.

“UUNGH!” Euchiss corkscrewed out of the way and
BANG!
like a drum, Joel knocked a splintery hole in the back of the wooden shelf. Diamonds pattered across the wood. Euchiss spun off onto the floor, hugging the rifle, and as soon as he fell on his back he came up with it, the barrel pointed at the man with the ball bat.

Blood trickled from a dent in the crest of Euchiss’s skull. Joel paused in terror, the Batdazzler raised.

A surge of hot madness roiled up inside of him, becoming a strained, kamikaze sort of bravery.
“Shoot me, son!”
Joel bellowed in challenge at the supine killer.

Euchiss pulled the trigger.
Click.

“Shit!” he hissed, and started to rack the bolt.

Joel clubbed the rifle out of the way, striding across the back of the fallen shelf, and stomped his chest as if he were killing a particularly foul insect. The bones flexed protestingly under Joel’s foot.

“URRRFUNNNNCK!” spat Euchiss, saliva misting.

He flipped over, abandoning the rifle, and beetled away across the carpet, drooling.

Having jarred so many of the diamonds off, the Batdazzler was little more than your average baseball bat. Joel stepped down from the overturned shelf and walked almost pleasantly alongside the belly-crawling Euchiss. He twirled the bat in a jaunty, careless way, but his face was the essence of grim, hard-bitten rage.

“This for all em cats you burnt,” said Joel, and whipped the bat hard across the killer’s spine. Vertebrae snapped with a soft, brittle crack.

Euchiss screamed into the darkness of the comic shop.

He turned over and put up his hands, trembling, his eyes wide and pleading. Only his upper body did so, his waist helixing, his legs sprawled uselessly where he’d left them, heels pointed upward.

Joel nosed the bat sharply back and forth, knocking his hands out of the way.

“No!” Euchiss cried, and then he started shrieking.

“This for my brother,” Joel grunted.

The bat slammed into Euchiss’s face on the diagonal, caving it in with a thick, wet
sputch
and cutting him off mid-scream.

The bat’s business end stayed in the ruins of Euchiss’s face. Cracks had appeared in the haft where it fractured on impact, and one eyeball bulged from underneath the wood, staring at the floor.

Joel stood up slowly, warily, as if he were afraid the floor were about to fall in. Sara stood next to him; he hadn’t even heard her come out of hiding. She didn’t say anything, but her face was pinched in disgust.

“Adapt and overcome,” Joel told the corpse.

42

R
OBIN
LED
THEM
THROUGH
the grate behind the shop into a storm drain the approximate height and width of a fireplace. The drain was filthy, strewn with old trash and dried mud, and smelled musty; it was all she could do to keep from dry-heaving. Kenway struggled along behind her, his prosthetic leg scraping on the concrete. Gendreau duck-walked, his jacket rolled up under his arm so it wouldn’t get wet.

She checked over her shoulder. Her new friends were only moving shapes in the shadows. Wayne’s glasses flashed white.

Sixty or seventy feet in, the ceiling opened up to the dim ink-blue clouds of the afternoon sky, and through a grate that ran the width of Broad Avenue they could see the familiars shambling around above. Shoes clomped across the steel as the crowd capered back and forth, shrieking and fighting each other.

“I forget,” said Lucas, bringing up the rear, “how long does the feral stage last after a dormant familiar is activated?”

Gendreau grunted, “Several hours. It really depends on the witch. But Cutty? Who knows?” A little girl on her hands and knees over the grille searched the darkness for them, her fingers laced through the steel slats. Her eyes were softly luminous moon-dimes.

Robin shushed them. “Shut up before they hear us.”

“Attention!”
shouted an augmented voice above, echoing through the valley of the street.
“This is Blackfield Police! You are ordered to disperse!”

Lucas blinked. “Police? Do they think it’s a riot?”

“Get your asses outta here! Right—”

The amplified voice was interrupted by the high crack of a grenade launcher, followed by chemical hissing and the
rakka-tak
of non-lethal rounds and the chest-thumping
boom
of beanbag shotguns.

The acidic reek of tear gas wafted down through the grille, making Robin’s eyes water. “It’s happened before. There was a pretty bad incident with familiars in California last year. The state claimed it was a riot over that court case. You know, the officer shooting?”

Familiars ran past, their shoes clattering across the grille in a cascade.

“That was you?”

“Yeah. I was trying to kill Adeline Stidman and she had the whole damn neighborhood after me. Chased me into a college campus, had the campus police involved. Biggest cock-up ever. Anyway…I guess when people don’t have any other explanation, people make shit up to fill in the blanks, you know?”

Gendreau chuffed humorlessly. “Connect the dots.”

“Here we go,” said Kenway.

Robin had been so focused on moving that she hadn’t noticed that they’d crossed both lanes of Broad, gone under the opposite sidewalk, and were underneath his sign shop. A grille showered the drain floor with warm yellow light. The two of them positioned themselves under it. The floor was sooty with black engine grease.

“This is gross.”

“Sorry,” he said. “This is where I park cars for vinyl wraps.” Kenway gripped the drain grille with both hands and braced himself, pushing. “Damn.” He stood up, bent over at the waist, and raised himself until his shoulders and the back of his head were against the metal, and he pushed with his legs. After only a few seconds he was straining so hard he was vibrating. “Unnngh,
damn.
It won’t move. It’s glued in by all the muck. It might even be bolted down.”

Robin pressed her human hand to his chest, gently shooing him out of the way. “Here, let me try.”

“I don’t know how—” he started to say.

She cleared her throat. “Trust me.”

Taking his place, Robin looked up through the grate. She could see the ceiling of the garage. Kneeling on one knee, she reared back with the demon-hand and struck the grille with her open palm as hard as she could. Her freakish left hand, twice the size of her right hand and as hard as wire, clanged noisily against the steel.

Bits of grease and dirt rained down onto them and Robin shielded her face, scraping her lips with her shirt. She’d expected it to hurt to some degree, even though it was tough, but there was nothing—only the reverberations of the impact traveling up to her shoulder.

It was sort of liberating, to be honest; what else could she do with this? How sturdy
was
this thing?

The self-proclaimed curandero had worked his strange shamanic healing-magic on her arm (she still hated calling it magic, and now she began to feel this was because that the word
cheapened
something she’d come to know and fear as a powerful force), and somehow without the bent staples embedded in it, the scars of the surgery had dissipated. The fibers were almost as big around as her original arm; they had stretched out the U-shaped scar like a yawning mouth, the edges strained and ripping until the hole had been five, six inches across. Skin pulled taut over the scabrous blackwood bone that was now her new arm.