MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (38 page)

He’d always been a creature of black and whites, but tonight he found himself walking down a road painted with a thousand shades of gray.

“So?” Chuck said, flashing a grin and waving toward the motley crew, which came to a halt a few feet back. “Looking good, am I right? This dude, Hogg, don’t stand a chance against this all-star team.”

“All-star team,” Levi replied. “Why don’t we step over here and have a little chat, Chuck.” He turned his back and lumbered a safe distance away from the group, Chuck following on his heels. Then Levi moved like a mudslide, pivoting and shifting as he turned, his bulk flowing out as his fat fingers wrapped around Chuck’s throat and lifted the man from his feet. Levi slammed him into the wall with a
whomp
and held him there, Chuck’s toes brushing against the ground.

“Remember what I said, back in the Lonely Mountain?” Levi asked. “I said you better not pull any leprechaun nonsense on me. I said bad things would happen if you did that. Bad things involving legs and fingers and toes. This”—he pointed with his free hand toward the crew—“seems to fit the bill. I’m going to give you one minute to explain.” Levi kept his hand wrapped around Chuck’s throat, but lowered him to the ground and eased up enough to let him speak his piece.

Chuck wheezed and coughed as he sucked in a double lungful of air. “Damn, dude, you gotta stop pulling this bullshit, Levi. I know what you’re thinkin’—but this was the best I could do with the time I had. Professional mercs are jumpy, man. Most of those guys aren’t down with working a job like this on such short notice with limited intel, you feel me? Mercs like money, Levi, but they like not dyin’ more. These guys can help us get the job done, though. I’m tellin’ you God’s own truth.”

“Still not convinced,” Levi replied, tightening his grip a hair. “You’ve got thirty seconds left.”

“Chill, Boss-man,” he said, his fingers digging into Levi’s grip, trying to pry the Mudman’s hand loose.

Levi didn’t relent.

“Those cats in the cardigans,” he croaked, “they don’t look like much, but they’re the Black Shillelaghs. I know your crazy ass musta heard about them.”

Levi loosened his grip a little more.

He
had
heard of the Black Shillelaghs. Most folks in Outworld knew about them. Freelance thugs with ties to the Court of the Unfettered Fae and the Real IRA—the Real Irish Republic Army. Not killers so much as finger-breakers and knee-cappers, but a vicious lot by all accounts. No one had ever mentioned they were wee folk. Though, it did make a certain sense, he supposed.

“And the others?” Levi asked, suspicious. “You going to try and convince me those decrepit trolls are really enforcers for the East-end Legion? And maybe those tweakers are the brains behind the 6
th
Street Grims?”

“How you gonna be like that, Levi? I ain’t trying to scam you, alright. Those turds are bullet catchers. And they weren’t my idea, man, the Shillelaghs brought those gems on board. Look, I’m not sure if you noticed, but those dudes”—he dropped to a whisper—“are tiny. Sons a bitches are mean like honey badgers, but they’re better at stealth. They send these brain-dead dudes in first, kinda a big dumb smoke screen, then they sneak in under veils and beat the shit outta anything that even thinks about lookin’ at ’em funny. I’ve seen these dudes work, Levi. Like piranhas—straight up savage.”

Levi frowned, ran his free hand over his blocky chin, then released Chuck’s windpipe and patted the man on the chest. “Okay, you did alright. I’ve got one other thing before we head in.” He removed the duffle bag from his shoulder and gently placed it on the ground. He bent over, unzipped the main compartment, and removed the hefty silver-lined box covered with containment sigils.

“That the egg from the temple?” Chuck asked, eyeing the box askew.

Levi nodded once. “You know the deal. If things go sideways, and they might, I’m going to need you to do what needs to be done. Here’s your part …”

Levi spent a few minutes spelling out the plan and Chuck’s role, then headed over to his army.

The leprechauns, for the most part, leaned against the building’s wall, smoking their pipes in stoic silence, while the others shifted on nervous feet. Bullet catchers, Chuck had called them. Levi took a moment to examine each of these. Despite their fearsome or ragged appearances, none of those were killers. Levi could read a great deal in their auras—brokenness, pain, addiction, sin, heartbreak. Not good folks, but not worthy of death. Not so different from him, really. Yet many of them, even most of them, would likely die inside that warehouse tonight.

Guilt and irony hit him like a one-two combination: here he was, a failed Anabaptist preparing to go to war, preparing to offer up innocent lives for his cause. These creatures were willing volunteers, and paid for their work, but that changed nothing. Not in the grand scheme of things. How had he come to this road? How had he fallen so far? Just a few scant days ago the thought of taking an innocent life had been unfathomable, and now he was going to send these men to their deaths for the sake of his own private war.

For a moment he considered turning around and going home—forgetting this whole thing had ever happened. But no, it was too late for that. He didn’t know if he’d be able to live with himself when this was all over, but maybe that, not the gold, was the real price he would have to pay. Besides, walking away and abandoning Ryder to a terrible end would haunt him just as much. No good choices here, and no matter which path he took, regret and remorse were waiting like a lion in the high-grass ready to pounce.

He cleared his throat, the sound of grating boulders, then spoke. “You all ready for this?” he asked.

The trolls and halfies said nothing.

An especially gruff and weathered leprechaun with a ragged scar running over one eye stepped forward and nodded his square head. “Aye, boy. No need to pep talk us. We know our business well enough and we know what we’re about, thanks to our boy there.” He nodded toward Chuck. “Now let’s stop pissing ’round and killing time. You lead the way and leave us to do our work.”

The leprechaun was right, they’d already wasted time they didn’t have to spare.

Levi turned and gestured toward the rolling door at the rear of Atlantic Biotech Solutions. “I’ll let us in.”

The Mudman stomped his way across the deserted street and angled toward the building’s loading dock. Without losing a step, he hefted one of the boulders—a huge thing that weighed three or four hundred pounds, easy—flanking the rolling door. He waited only a handful of seconds for his shabby army to assemble behind him.

“On three,” he said, raising the stone in a huge mitt, which had swelled and lengthened to accommodate the stone’s weight and size.

“
One …”
Muscles tightened in anticipation.

“Two …”
The sound of shuffling feet and cracking knuckles followed.

“Three …”
Levi hurled the stone before the word fully left his mouth.

The door squealed in protest as metal buckled inward and rollers ripped from their track. The door, once moored to a metal frame, flopped to the floor in a clatter. The rock had done its work well, punching in like a cannonball breaching a ship’s hull. Instead of water pouring in, however, trolls, halfies, and hard-nosed leprechauns flooded past Levi in a wave, swarming into the opening.

TWENTY-NINE:

Royal Rumble

Levi waited for a heartbeat, then glanced back, eyes searching for Chuck. He was gone, just as Levi had instructed. The Mudman gave a shake of his head. What had he been thinking putting so much responsibility on a man he wouldn’t trust to feed his cat? Levi wouldn’t even let the incompetent huckster water his plants, yet now the leprechaun halfie had his finger on the supernatural equivalent of an atomic bomb? War could make strange bedfellows and even stranger choices. Done was done, though, so Levi put the man from his mind, grabbed the other boulder flanking the smashed-to-hell rolling door, and headed into the fray.

The interior was all gray concrete and steel, illuminated with sodium lights hanging from rafters overhead—the standard affair. Nothing else about the scene, however, came even close to
standard
. The warehouse had been divvied up and transformed from a storage facility to something out of a science-fiction movie. On the right, a substantial space had been walled off with dense Plexiglas and repurposed into some sort of research area. Huge incubation tubes lined the wall behind the glass; each container housed various specimens—some human looking, others not.

A slew of machinery crowded the area, making the space look as though it did indeed belong in a genetics laboratory. A bank of computers and monitoring equipment here, some sort of tubular machine—an MRI, Levi thought—cordoned off by more Plexiglas lurked in one corner. There were medical tables, stainless steel contraptions with leather straps, framed by a wide array of medical tools decorating the walls:

Spotless surgical sheers. Razor-edged scalpels, in a variety of shapes and sizes. Circular electric bone saws. A huge assortment of fluid-filled jars and a shelf laden with syringes and amber-glass medical vials. There were blunt-faced mallets, thick metal rasps, calipers, tissue forceps, and a slew of curved needles for suturing wounds shut. If Levi was still standing when this business was all over and done with, he fully intended to come back and melt this whole building down to slag. Leave nothing behind.

He shifted his gaze away from the Frankenstein laboratory, only to be hit by a wave of déjà vu as his eyes swept over what appeared to be the Kobock temple from the Deep Downs. The same temple Levi had raided, what felt like a lifetime ago, except this one butted up against the backside of the offices at the front of the building. Not everything was the same, obviously, but the grotesque pillars were present, as was the ruby-eyed altar featuring the wyrm god, and the stone table. The table that he’d found Ryder chained to.

The table Ryder was chained to once more, which completed the eerie sense that this whole thing had come full circle.

Out of place was a human woman in blue scrubs—it had to be Jamie, Ryder’s sister—who cowered next to the wizened old Kobock shaman Levi had tangled with the first time around. The woman in the scrubs looked terrified and way out of her depth; her gaze constantly shifted between her sister and the commotion unfolding in the warehouse proper. The shaman, however, didn’t even bother to look up from his work; instead he eyeballed a crusted old tome—bound in skin—while he brewed some potion in a large cauldron resting over a green flame.

Behind them, chained to the wall near the altar, was Professor Wilkie. His hands were stretched taut above his head, his eyes were almost entirely swollen shut, and his breathing was irregular and ragged.

Bad news, all around.

The Mudman glanced down at a watch he’d donned just for this occasion. 1:06 AM They had
minutes
before the shaman would carve into Ryder, complete the ancient ritual, and bring a dusty old god back into the world of men once more.

The brand in his chest thrummed with fire and fury, sending a surge of raw adrenaline blasting into his limbs, urging him to action, spurring him to cave in heads and pull the shaman’s limbs from their sockets.

Sadly, between Levi and Ryder lurked a legion of filthy blue-skinned Kobos—sixty or seventy strong, at least—ready to brawl.

Most sported only soiled loincloths, but a few were clad in crude armor cobbled together from hubcaps or grocery carts or corrugated metal siding. Each held a weapon, be it a broken beer bottle or a club studded with rusted nails, or, in one case, a horse’s jawbone. The blue-skinned creatures watched on with bewildered expressions; they’d been expecting Levi, no doubt, but no one could’ve ever prepared for Levi’s reinforcements. A sharp, whip-crack command from the shaman stole away the bewildered looks in a flash and sent the Kobocks rushing forward in a charge of manic fear and killing rage.

Levi’s own forces sprinted across the open space, the geriatric trolls in the lead, long legs devouring the distance, while the halfies spread out to either side, like a defensive football line going in for the block.

A
boom
shook the walls as the two sides collided together in a mash of meat and muscle. The front line Kobocks slammed into the trolls and halfies, throwing themselves in with reckless abandon: rotten teeth bit down, bottles lashed out, claws dug into exposed skin. The trolls held the line, however, and gave as good as they got: wicked talons carving channels in unprotected flesh or snapping overextended arms in sickening
pops
loud as gunfire.

The brutish trolls fought with a strength and viciousness Levi wouldn’t have guessed at, and the halfies weren’t half bad either, especially for a bunch of junkies. The halfies fought as if they didn’t feel pain—which might have been true—switchblades flashing out, rusty chains whirling, lead pipes cracking skulls. One halfie, his hide the slick green of a toad, used his acid covered tongue, long as a bull whip, to scorch any Kobo that tried to break through the ranks.

As much as Levi wanted to wade in, smashing and killing, this wasn’t his fight. The reinforcements would deal with the Kobocks, and Chuck would help Ryder and stop the shaman. That thought gave him pause—after all, if Chuck screwed this up they could all be dead before the sun rose on a new day.

But the plan was the plan. What was the point of coming up with a plan at all if Levi didn’t follow it?

The reinforcements for the Kobos. Check. Chuck for Ryder. Check. His job was to find Hogg and end him, since he was the brain behind all this …

Still, much as he needed to move on, he couldn’t pass up such a great opportunity—all those Kobocks bunched together, practically begging to be obliterated. He planted his feet and snarled as he launched the boulder in his right hand, arching the four-hundred-pound stone over the front line and into the Kobock reserves. Four Kobos, maneuvering around the side, shrieked and howled as his hailstone of Judgment bowled into them: bones snapped and bodies exploded in a gush of sickly fluids.