The Blue Blazes (22 page)

She’s getting up now, getting her legs under her–

Run, baby, run.
 

But Candlefly stalks toward her. Gun out. As she tries to stand he bashes her in the back of the head. Mookie tries to scream, tries to tell Candlefly he’s going to rip his spine out his mouth and reinstall it through his asshole, but all he can do is whimper and mewl as Nora rolls over–

Candlefly straddles her–

She holds up her hands like that matters–

Then Candlefly puts a bullet into her gut.
Bang
.

Mookie bites through his own tongue.

Tastes blood. Smells gunpowder. Sees darkness.

 

22

 

We are lost in the Tangle. Its labyrinthine passages confound. Passages up, holes down, tunnels east, caverns west – endlessly looping upon themselves. Direction has no meaning. Nor does time. It’s like outer space – or, perhaps, its opposite. I’ve seen many places – rooms, if you will – that are distinct. Rooms of stalagmites and stalactites that look like bloodied teeth, grottos with rock outcroppings that look like faces, old goblin nests filled with the remnants of stolen humanity: a child’s tricycle, a stop light, a fireman’s mask. Dangers abound, too: pools of stinking sulfur, drips of snotty acid from stone above, pockets of gas – some that choke, some that conjure sleep, some that will strip the skin from your bones. Cerberus, who I’ve since learned is really named Danny, is still leading us forward, but though he claims to know the way, his roving gaze tells me we’re lost. To my mind, we have only one important direction to reach the Expanse: down, down, always down.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

A goblin hand touches her face. Skelly gasps, cries out – consciousness slamming back into her like the action on a pistol. Her hand feels on the ground, finds a rock–

Bam
. Clocks it into the side of the monster.

“Ow, fuck!”

She staggers to her feet.

A long tunnel. Subway tile merged with porous stone. The only light comes from flecks of glowing blue stuck in the pores of the tunnel walls. Like fireflies crushed into the rock.

Burnsy is on the ground. Clutching his head.

“Oh, shit,” Skelly says, hurrying over. Helping him up.

“You brained me with a rock.”

“Sorry, daddy-o.”

“Daddy-o. Who does that? Who still uses that word?”

She shrugs. “Kind of our thing. The Get-Em-Girls.”
Whatever’s left of us, anyway
. “It’s a habit. I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Yeah. Well. A guy rescues you from a pack of goblins and nurses your cuts and he gets a rock to the dome to pay for it. That should teach me.”

A wave of guilt washes over her. “I thought you were… one of them.”

“I’m ugly, but I’m not
that
ugly. Anyway, if you’re up, it’s time to move. I haven’t heard any of those fuckers for a while, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still out there, searching. They’ll give up eventually – they have the patience of a twitchy cricket – but I still don’t want to take my chances.” As Burnsy talks, he starts packing up gear into an old 80s-era Jansport backpack.

Her wounds suddenly flare with fresh pain – a slow sting that transitions to a hot throb. She lifts her hand to her face, where the bones cut her, and feels her palm is sticky. And it smells like a dead animal.

Burnsy must see her face because he says, “It’s gopher grease.”

“Do I wanna know?”

“Not really.”

She blanches. Sniffs it again. “I think I wanna know.”

“There’s an animal down here. It’s like a gopher, but it’s all white, has eight legs, and is blind as my mother–”

“So, nothing like a gopher.”

“We call ’em gophers, all right? You know, just for being a smartass I’m gonna tell you the whole thing. That grease on your hand is from their anal glands.”

“Oh, god!” She gags, turns, tries to wipe her hand on the wall.

“Whoa, whoa, don’t do that. That stuff is at a premium. It heals cuts like you wouldn’t believe. Keep that goop on you, goddamnit.”

She winces. Lets her hand hang so she doesn’t have to smell it.

Backpack slung over his blistered shoulder, he waves her on. “Let’s go, let’s go. We gotta move. I got a lead on the dead Zoladski kid.”

“Change of subject,” she says, hurrying after him. “How’d you find me?”

“Luck, mostly.”

“You just… stumbled upon me.”

“Nah. Not
that
lucky. I was looking, trust me – I told Mookie I would. The luck part is that I found a ghost that had seen you. The poor demised fucker didn’t know what he’d seen, of course – mostly he was just reliving his last moments in his head again and again – but he’d seen the gobbos dragging you and some of the other folks from Daisypusher. I knew the location of the temple. Went to scout it and there you were. Half-conscious. A pack of gobbos on your tail. They took you one direction, the Daisypusher dead in another.”

They round a curve in the tunnel and she can feel a gentle slope downward.

“And how’d we get away from them? The goblins.”

He doesn’t have to answer her. All he has to do is point.

Up ahead is a souped-up Yamaha four-wheeler. With big-ass wheels swaddled in spiked, studded chains. Like chains for driving on winter roads but juiced up on steroids. On the front of the quad is a goblin skull with plastic googly eyes. The rest of the thing is painted red, white, and blue.

“Go America,” she says, somewhat breathless. “This is what you had under that tarp out back of your house, wasn’t it?”

“You got it. She’s an all right ride. Better than walking on foot. Doesn’t get into the nooks and crannies, but she’ll take me most places in the Shallows, even carry me through some of the Tangle if I need her to.” He winces, straddles the seat. “Chafes the shit out of my thighs to drive, but such is the not-quite-life of a reanimated burn victim. Hop on.”

He pats the seat.

She eases behind him.

He pops on a pair of goggles. Gives her a pair, too. They’re shop goggles made of clear – if dirty – plastic all the way around.

Then–

Key in the ignition. The engine gutters, then grumbles to life – a fat, slovenly dragon awakening from slumber after eating all the villagers.

“Let’s go find ourselves a ghost,” he says.

Then he guns it.

 

Time oozes. It twists. It crawls, centipede-like, away from Nora’s grip. She does not know how long she’s been here. How long since they killed her father, since they shot her in the stomach. How long since she thought she had the world in her hand and Mookie Pearl by the leash. How long since it all went to shit.

How long since Candlefly – whose face was now a mincemeat pie baked in a bloody crust – dropped her here in this bedroom to bleed out and die. How long since he whispered in her ear, “You betrayed me, and so now you suffer a death that creeps up on you, the anticipation slow as your misery mounts.”

She lies on the bed. Breath coming in little shallow rabbit gasps.

I’m dying.

Bullet in her middle. Tore up – what? Her stomach? Liver? A kidney?

A little voice reminds: It was always going to come down to this. You knew that, didn’t you? You kept coming at the beast. One day the beast would return the favor.

Then, a defiant voice: Not. Dead. Yet.

She slides a trembling hand into her pocket. Finds her tin of blue. Pops it: not much left but enough for now. She almost fumbles it, drops it on the bed but manages to cup her fingers into a little shovel and scoop out some Cerulean.

Nora presses powder to each temple. Blue flecks flaking onto the white pillow and bedsheets.

It washes over her, a tide of fire, hot like a habanero, then warm like whiskey.

Soon her breathing grows deeper. Fuller. The Blue won’t mend her – it’s strong enough for superficial wounds but not a gut-shot.

But it’ll keep her alive for a little while longer.

She stays like that for a while. Stilling her breath. Willing the wound to go numb. Trying to imagine how she’s going to escape. Trying
not
to think about her father. That last one: an impossibility. Her mind wanders to him. Is he dead? He must be. This moment, she thought it’d bring her happiness. To see the man who poisoned her life himself poisoned? But was that what she wanted? For her father to
die
?

It isn’t. She just wanted him to finally pay attention. That was all. All of this was to force him to see her. To see who she was, and who she’d become because of him.

And now he’s dead.

And she’ll be dead soon too if she can’t figure out what to do next.

 

I’m gonna die.

Again.

Skelly escaped the gobbo temple and thought that was the end of it. Now here she is, reminded of her own mortality once more. Death doesn’t stare her in the face so much as
whip past her
at what feels like a hundred miles-per-hour.

The quad barrels through downward-sloping Underworld tunnels. The quad bounds and growls. Tires bounce over hard rock, giving the whole vehicle a bounce and a lift where Skelly’s stomach feels like it leaves her body and gets left behind. Burnsy’s loving it. Hooting. Letting go of the handlebars and holding two blister-red fists up in the air. It’s then she remembers:

He was a stuntman.

I’m driving though hell on a four-wheeler with a formerly-living stuntman.

Once again her brain reiterates what she now feels is absolutely true:

I’m gonna die.

It’s not liberating, this feeling. Her life does not flash before her eyes. She is, in fact, married to the moment. Married to every scraggy rock that passes within inches of her skull, bound to every rough-rimmed pothole the quad drops into, fixed permanently with the air in her face and the bite of the goggles around her eyes and the skitter of roach-rats and cankerpedes as they flee before the coming four-wheeler.

Once upon a time, she fancied herself a tough bitch. Now she’s not so sure.

At least she isn’t pissing her pants. Small favors and all that.

The tunnel twists. It pulls hard right; tires grind on loose stone, spraying gravel against the wall like buckshot. Then a serpentine left – before curving right again.

Suddenly –
whoosh
– they’re out of a tunnel and into a wide-open cavern, a massive sepulchrous chamber with twisting salt columns that look like piles of melting soft serve peppered with ice crystals. The ceiling looks melty, too – colors like paint melting. But that’s not what truly draws her eye and lends this cavern a graveyard vibe.

The room is home to what must be hundreds of statues.

No. Not statues.
Skeletons
. Put back together. Rearticulated. Made to stand up. Hollow-eyed skulls tilted on bowed spines so they are forever staring down.

At first she thinks they’re children, but as soon as they pass one and she sees the deformation of the bones, the bulbous off-shape of the skull, she realizes:

These are goblin skeletons.

As if she were not afraid enough.

Burnsy must sense her fear – maybe in the way she grabs him tighter. He shouts back at her, “Goblin graveyard! Don’t worry! They fear their own dead – won’t come near the place!” The quad winds through the bone garden. Then he yells, “Hold on!”

They hit a skeleton. It bursts. Bones rattle around them. Something that might be a knucklebone pops off the front of her goggle.

She’s about to scream at Burnsy, but then he points–

“There!
There!
”

A flickering shape at the edge of the bone garden. Pale. Human. Walking forward, toward a tunnel. The shape blinks in and out of existence. Erratic and intermittent, a light switch flipped on, off, on, off by a mischievous child.

A ghost.

She’s never seen one. She knows they’re down here, but unless you’re looking for them, they tend to be invisible. Just foggy shapes at the periphery of one’s eye.

But they’re looking for this one, and so there he is.

Burnsy revs the engine, and the four-wheeler lurches ahead of the flickering specter. Then he cuts the brakes and spins the quad around as it stops. Skelly’s stomach, trailing behind, suddenly comes plunging back into her body. A wave of nausea mitigated by a spike in adrenalin damn near knocks her flat.

Burnsy kills the engine. All is silence. The ghost makes no sound as it moves toward them in a herky-jerky shuffle. It stares at nothing – the eyes are barely eyes at all, more like holes in an old tablecloth. The toothless mouth stretches open impossibly, the throat a black cave that keens with a faint moan that calls to mind a distant wind. The body is naked. The flesh pale, smooth like porcelain, the manhood a shriveled, crooked thing.

Burnsy hops off the quad. Skelly follows, her legs almost giving out.

He lifts the seat. From underneath he removes a flat metal shape – brass, ornate. He pulls up, and it pops into the shape of a hollow cube. Each piece looks delicate as a bird bone, all the little Byzantine brass bits tied together at junctions by fraying red thread. The corners of the box are little decorative skulls – human – with brass tacks for eyes.

“Soul cage,” Burnsy says, striding toward the ghost. He stops ten feet in front of it and waits, holding the cube up in his blood-blister hands.

Skelly moves to his side as the ghost continues inevitably toward them. She cannot repress a chill. Visions of death wash over her. She sees herself, dead by a hundred ways – hanging, burning, gunshot, drowning, plane crash even though she’s never been in a plane. She sees Lulu, her neck ripped open. Her own mother, dying in a hospital bed from emphysema – the gurgled whisper of a woman drowning in her own body.

Burnsy elbows her. The death visions break apart like old bread. “Getting near a ghost and staring it down does that to you,” he says, like he knows.

“Don’t know what you mean, jellybean,” she says, but even she hears the quaver in her voice.

“The soul is in the heart, in case you were wondering. That’s the core of us. Not what’s in our heads, but what’s felt in our hearts.” He holds the soul cage at chest level, and step-by-erratic-step, the ghost comes toward them. Burnsy doesn’t shove the cage at the specter but rather lets the specter walk up to the cage–

It disappears through the wraith’s chest.