No Dogs in Philly (22 page)

They came at last to the center of the
cathedral, where all the rows of columns converged, all the aisles
coming from all the doors and all the bridges and other tunnels
leading to what she guessed were houses of other murderers. There
was a dais and atop it was an altar, a solid black block of stone
that, for a change, didn’t seem to be made out of bodies. It was
occupied. A pale white arm hung over the side and she could see
that the veins had been opened. Blood trickled down the fingers to
fall onto the dais.

“
Here she is,” Friar said, beaming
back at her. “The girl. The very special girl.”

Saru’s heart lifted and then sank. For the
briefest second she thought maybe Friar had been yanking her chain
and had found the girl for her. Then for the second-briefest of
seconds she realized he had found the girl and murdered her. For
the third-briefest of seconds she thought he would let her go,
mission accomplished, and then she realized how fucking stupid that
was and only then did she feel the guilt for hoping another
person’s death meant that she could live. She followed Friar up to
the dais and joined him by the altar. The girl was young—God how
that twisted the guilt knife—twenty at most but her dark hair had
the telltale streaks of gray from using sky. She was pretty, blue
eyes open, staring dead at the ceiling, mouth a little open with a
spot of blood blending with her lipstick. Her throat had been cut
deep, and the veins of her other arm opened as well, arms and legs
spread so she looked like she was just relaxing. They’d stripped
her naked, pale skin all the way, signs of bruises, breaks, old
scars and fuckups that had happened long before Friar had cut her
up. There was the telltale triangular bite mark of a venereal
inoculation on her mons so it was safe to guess she’d done a bit of
bodywork. Shit, perhaps this really was a kindness.

“
What was her name?” Saru asked,
not really wanting to know, not sure if she cared.

“
Ria,” he said. “Just
Ria.”

Ria. It wasn’t a name on the list. She hadn’t
even gotten that right. Or maybe Jojran had found one of her
aliases, just like Fanny Duvak.

“
How did you find her?”

“
She found us,” he said, sweeping
his arm around to indicate all the doors leading into the
cathedral. “She found us here, following our voice, the voice of
her friend, her lover, her father, mother, brothers, and sisters.
She wanted to be safe, wanted protection…”

He was blathering. What did it matter, anyway?
Ria was dead; the other women were dead, maybe not now, but
eventually. And Saru was dead, as soon as he stopped talking,
probably. Better to enjoy her last moments thinking of the good
times in life, the few good fucks she’d had and the scratches she’d
left in some pretty boys, the time she’d taken LSD and ridden on
the Ferris wheel, and that one day where the haze had thinned and
turned a little blue and she’d put on a dress and had a picnic in
the park. So what if it had been by herself, and the food was just
a sandwich she’d bought at a corner store washed down with a forty?
It was nice and it felt warm and she’d hiked up her dress and felt
sun on her thighs. That was a good day, a good memory—but was it
right to go out on? It felt like a lie, to have that as her ending
note, as if she’d lived some happy sunshine life that was all
doodly-dee and la-dee-da. Better to think about the real times, the
good shots she’d made, the solid blows, the perps tied up and
dragged, and the ten thousand cracks to her skull that gave her a
blood-spit grin. She felt it now, coming for no reason she could
tell, and it made her feel good to grin at death. Yeah, this was
right
.

“…
she was afraid, in pain,
lost…”

Just kill me already. Maybe she should kill
herself, blow herself up with a micro grenade and maybe take him
with her. Could she time it right and hit just him? And what if she
missed or he whipped out more hocus pocus and ruined her—was that a
dog? She blinked. Still there. She rubbed her eyes, still there, a
giant golden dog that she could have just about saddled, sitting on
his haunches about ten feet behind Friar. Her scans showed nothing,
nothing but two live human bodies and a freshly dead body. No fur
balls. She slapped herself. Still there. Friar stopped talking and
looked at her. She slapped herself again and felt a twinge of
satisfaction that with all her previous impotence she’d managed
this tiny victory of confusing him.

“
Here boy,” she said. “Good
dog.”

Friar turned to follow her gaze. He stared at
the spot where she was looking like he was trying to set the dog on
fire with his eyes. She had the peculiar thought that Friar
couldn’t see the dog, that the dog was only for her. Friar
smiled.

“
I know you’re there,” he said
calmly, but there was a hint of threat in his voice and that gave
her hope. The entire time he’d been so relaxed, so calm and casual
and unbothered by murder and combat and draining her blood and
nearly getting shot in his fucking face—the bastard. To hear him
suddenly threaten was—she hoped—a sign that he felt a threat. And
almost to confirm her instinct she heard a slithering and a groan,
like the gently singing voices had missed a note and were angry.
With the slithering came the centipedes, appearing one by one in
the entrances, their human-torso heads wriggling their arms like
antennae.

The dog didn’t seem bothered by any of this.
He, or she, Saru couldn’t tell if it had balls or not, got on all
fours and padded to the altar, springing lightly up to rest on top
of Ria. Friar followed the dog with his gaze—could he see it
now?—and his jaw twitched like he was grinding his teeth. The
voices grew angrier, louder. She could see the tips of his blood
strings begin to poke from the skin of his hands.

“
How dare you!” he called at Ria’s
dead body. “How dare you defile this holy place with your
presence!”

There was a flash, a column of gold erupted
from the dog and enveloped the altar and Ria’s body. The heat
forced Saru back but Friar stood firm—blood and pus dribbled from
the cracks on his face as the skin charred and split. She decided
now was as good a time as any to make a run for it, but as she
started for the door the centipede—how was she planning to get past
it again?—shot forward and reared up before her, the eyes of the
torsos opening wide, the mouths all with mocking smiles, and they
laughed at her with their dead mouths and throats, an awful sound
of sputtering mufflers and forks caught in the garbage disposal.
She skittered to a stop, an inch from a grasping hand covered in
lice and worms and rot, and took a step back. The centipede slid
back a few feet and she took another step—another step, another
slither, another step, another slither, until she was right back
where she’d started and the centipede was back in the doorway.
Cute.

The column of gold faded and the altar was
gone, melted and cooled into a pretty glass slag. Ria stood, alive,
intact, skin glowing like pure light, no sign of cut or injury, and
her eyes were blue jewels that shone and hurt to look at. Light
seemed to pour out of her body, and it was warm and comfortable,
and suddenly Saru felt safe, like her big sister had come over from
the big kid’s playground to kick that bully’s ass.

“
Begone!” Friar hollered at Ria,
sounding like he’d smoked a case of cigars. “You are not welcome
here!”

She looked at him like he was pigeon shit on
her favorite shoes. A beam of blue light shot from her eyes and he
vaporized. It happened in a flash, so quick Saru couldn’t even
process. He was gone. Ria walked over and put a hand on Saru’s
shoulder. It seemed her glow faded somewhat and she was just a girl
now, a pretty, naked girl who had been dead a few minutes
earlier.

“
Sister,” she said, and smiled. “I
have come.”

“
Enough!”

Saru jolted back, the prod appearing in her
hand. Ria turned and another blue beam shot from her eyes. It was
Friar’s voice that had called, and out of the corner of her eye she
saw another Friar vaporize. And another, and another—they wriggled
like tar up from the floor or detached themselves from the columns
to swell or shrink and then harden into a new human, a new Friar,
intact, dressed in his same ugly suit—that was a small mercy—to be
vaporized until the latest of a dozen Friars caught the blue beam
in his hand, grasped it like a bright blue tennis ball and then
squeezed so it sparked and fizzled into nothing. Ria quit trying to
vaporize him for a moment and stared with that same
shit-on-my-new-carpet look.

“
Go,” Friar said. “It is not your
time to know joy.”

“
You go,” Ria sneered. “I claim
this world.”

“
By what right?” he asked. “You
are unknown, unwanted.”

“
By right of conquest,” she
bellowed and spread her arms. “Every organism, every atom of mass,
every gasp of atmosphere I claim as mine and I shall destroy all
who stand in opposition!”

She shot the beam from her eyes again,
brighter, thicker, more intense. He caught it but couldn’t hold on,
and it washed over him and he died, Saru guessed. It was hard to
tell anymore who was dead and alive and if it really made any
difference at this point. Because he was back a second later, in
another corner of the room—and maybe that’s how he’d snuck up on
her, come to think of it. He hadn’t crept up or swooped down but
just squirted up from the floor.

“
These people do not want you!”
the new Friar hissed. “They desire love!”

“
What the chattel of this planet
desire is of no concern to me,” Ria said, vaporizing him
again.

No new Friar emerged. Ria lifted her arm as
though she were tossing a ball and lo and behold a ball appeared, a
bright white orb that flew up and cast its harsh fluorescence
through the cathedral. There was a flash of light, a thin white ray
from the orb and the sound of wires crossing mixed with someone
sucking spit. Another Friar, vaporized. Ria had offed the chore of
murder to her toy. Lovely. Saru should get one. The flashes came
faster and faster until the ball and its light faded. There was a
groan behind her and she whirled to see a body detaching itself
from a column. It came free with a
shcluck
and then shivered
and slouched its way towards her. The eyes and mouth opened, and
from them burst tangles of hair-thin strings. Saru dodged but three
stuck in her leg, three orgasmic knife thrusts, and she could feel
the blood sucked greedily out. A flash and the wires burned away
and the body
poofed
into a cloud of ash. But more came from
the walls, crawling down from the ceiling, men, women, and children
with dancing bloody wires poking from their eyes and mouths,
metal-spaghetti vomit writhing out, and it seemed they spoke to her
then: “Come…come…come, Saru.”

She tossed a micro grenade at the nearest group
and blew them all to smithereens. At her back Ria sent more globes
into the air, a circling halo of pearls that cackled out death
rays. She laughed and shot blue death from her eyes, holding out
her hands and bathing the area around them in wide cones of golden
flame. Saru tossed another micro grenade, knife in the off-left,
prod in the right hand, feeling inadequate. That’s right assholes,
come any closer and I’ll zap ya. There was a voice in her ear,
Friar, and she turned and strained her neck and looked in every
possible direction, but his fat ass was nowhere to be seen. He was
in her head, a spirit, a voice, like the singing voices of the pit
and the cathedral, not physical but there.

“
Do you really wish to serve this
woman?” he asked. “Look at her. She is a creature who loves
violence.”

That was true enough. Ria was blasting and
burning with the joy of a kid in a porno store. A particularly fat
corpse waddled at her and she seemed to shiver with delight as she
ignited his wires and watched the flames travel back and consume
him. And so what?

“
Doesn’t bother me,” Saru said,
guessing Friar could hear her. A tiny child corpse tottered through
the rays of light and fires to try and latch its wires onto her.
She kicked it in the head and then nearly vomited when the head
tore free and bounced away. Wires slithered through the gore of her
neck, worms in mud, and then shot out in all directions. She batted
them away with the prod, but one wrapped around her leg and
burrowed into her shin. Oh God, oh God yes and no. She sank to her
knees and grabbed at the wire but it was sharp and her hands came
away with blood. She felt it burrow deep, yes! working its way up
her calf into her kneecap.

“
Make it stop,” she whimpered—oh
God it felt good. “Please make it stop.”

“
Come to us,” Friar whispered.
“Embrace us.”

“
No…” But oh fuck yes.

She kicked out with her left leg and tried to
cut the wire with her heel dagger, managing to cut open her shin in
the process. She got it the second time and stumbled to her feet,
where she swayed back and forth and watched the scene before her
like she was staring through an aquarium. They were surrounded now,
she and Ria, by a horde of naked, dead bodies spraying bloody snake
wires from their eyes and mouths. Ria seemed to dance and laugh as
she spun and shot bright colors from her eyes and hands, turning
the bodies into fire and ash. She clasped her hands together and
shot out a ray of golden fire the width of a truck tire, spinning
it around like a flashlight beam, passing through walls and columns
and hundreds of bodies and leaving crackling bloody steam and slag
behind her. The beam crossed a centipede—still perched in the
doorway—and hung there, casting the creature as black swirling
particles amidst the gold, and when the beam moved on there was
nothing, just a few severed legs clattering against the melted
stone in confusion.