The Gathering Dark (39 page)

But if he told Sophie not to look, it would ensure that she would do just that. Kuromaku could only hope that she was too focused on driving the car to pay much attention to the Nektum, and that Antoinette Lamontagne would be cradling her catatonic boy in the back seat, perhaps crooning to him softly with her eyes closed as she prayed for deliverance.

He did not have the heart to tell the woman that her God could not hear her; not from this place.

The tires screamed as Sophie cut the wheel to the right, speeding toward the bridge. Kuromaku shouted to her again, exhorting her to drive even faster. The Volkswagen bumped over several ruts in the road but he paid no attention, clamping tighter to his handhold, gaze sweeping the banks of the stream and the support beams of the bridge, where Nektum clung like starfish.

The engine roared. Below him, Sophie was silent. Kuromaku watched the horrid little demons, gauging the distance to the bridge. If they were lucky, they could be partway across before the Nektum even noticed them. Fifty yards from the bridge. Thirty.

Beyond it, Kuromaku could see the shimmering barrier that separated them from the world they knew, the wall that locked them into this hellish nightmare.

A dozen yards from the bridge, the engine whined, and at last the Nektum noticed. Like deformed babies they raised their heads. Kuromaku felt their eyes on him and his grip tightened on the pommel of his sword. The car was only a few feet from the bridge when the abhorrent little things attacked. They moved impossibly fast, swimming lightning fast to the supports of the bridge and then crawling up, scrambling on their bizarre appendages with sickening speed.

“Drive!” Kuromaku shouted.

The engine roared louder as the tires hit the bridge and surged forward, Sophie accelerating even further, moving dangerously fast. The Nektum moved in a blur. The car was halfway across the bridge when the creatures began to launch themselves at Kuromaku, webbed appendages spread out to either side, translucent bodies gliding across the air, mouths gnawing at nothing.

In a crouch, Kuromaku sliced his katana through the air, windmilling the blade around him one-handed. The Nektum were gelatinous, and he felt the tug of their gummy flesh as the sword cut through each one. Their corpses thumped to the roof of the car or onto the bridge. Other Nektum slapped against the car, sticking to the windows and the body of the Volkswagen. He knew it would be only seconds before they tore their way into the car.

Sophie laid on the horn, perhaps thinking that it might scare them off. Instead, even more of the demons flew off the structure of the bridge like a flock of birds rising from a tree. They launched themselves at the car.

The Volkswagen’s tires bumped hard as they reached the end of the bridge and hit the dusty road again. Kuromaku hacked at the air, dropped to his back on the roof of the car, and whirled the katana around, cutting up the Nektum. Chunks of their bodies fell upon him, sticking to his clothes. A quick glance back revealed that most of them had fallen away or missed the car entirely and now had massed on the bridge staring after the retreating car in eerily silent hunger.

Sophie began to cry out to him. The tone alone told him that one or more of the Nektum had gotten into the car. Of course they had! Her window was open. In order for him to be able to hold on, he had unthinkingly prevented her from closing off the car.

Damn it!
he thought, as he spun onto his knees again on the roof. Several Nektum were still clinging to it. Kuromaku raised his sword even as one of the translucent, unnervingly infantile demons launched itself at his face. Its appendages slapped against his skin, suckers digging instantly into the flesh. In his mind’s eye he saw again the awful carnage he had witnessed in Greece centuries before.

His face tore.

Kuromaku screamed.

By the sheer force of his will, of his rage, he transmuted the skin of his face into living fire, burning the Nektum off. The demon squealed as it melted, its viscera boiling and spilling onto the Volkswagen’s windshield. The car swerved, Sophie either unable to see or trying to keep away from whatever demons had slipped into the vehicle.

The Volkswagen shuddered to a halt. Kuromaku released his grip and rolled off the roof, even as he willed flame to become flesh once again. He landed on his feet, surveying the car. One of the Nektum shattered the glass of the rear window and it showered down upon a screaming Antoinette Lamontagne, who was trying to shield her boy even as she grabbed at the latch for her door. Another was in the front seat with Sophie, who had shot out one foot and pinned it to the passenger door, and still managed to drive the car a little ways before being forced to stop. The thing shrieked and tore at her boot.

Kuromaku snarled, almost unaware that he had bared his fangs. He sheathed the katana back into nothingness and this time it was his hands that erupted into devastating fire. With fingers of flame he tore Nektum off the car and threw them burning onto the side of the road. He melted the one that had snuck into the back seat and then went around to the passenger window. With his blazing fist he smashed the window, reached down, and grabbed the flailing thing from where it was trapped beneath Sophie’s boot. He tore it apart with fiery hands.

Antoinette sobbed in the back seat, covered in shards of glass, bent over her son. Sophie stepped out of the Volkswagen, stared at Kuromaku with eyes wide with shock, and then ran to him. His hands became flesh once more and he embraced her as he glared back toward the bridge. All but a few of the surviving Nektum had gone back to the river, swimming in the blood of their victims and the stink of their own waste. A small group, perhaps four or five, remained on top of the bridge, watching the escapees.

“Come on,” Kuromaku whispered to Sophie. “We cannot stop now. We’re so close.”

“We’re not close,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest. “We’re here.”

Surprised, Kuromaku glanced up and saw that she was right. They were less than a hundred yards from the barrier. Now that he saw it, he realized he could hear a low hum coming from the field of magickal energy. The barrier shimmered and sparked and looked to him like static on an old television screen.

“All right. Now we will see what we can do,” Kuromaku said.

He had thought, all along, that the unique nature of his species, the command of his molecular structure, might allow him to somehow slip through or even force a tear in the fabric of the thing. Barring that, it had occurred to him that they might try to ram the Volkswagen through it. Anything. They would try anything.

Yet even as he thought this, Sophie began to scream.

“No! No, damn you, no!” The words were French, but the agony in her voice would have come through in any language. Her anguish was a language all its own.

At first Kuromaku had no idea what was wrong with her. He grabbed her by the shoulders, tried to talk to her, to get her to look at him, but then he realized that she was staring at the barrier, at the manifestation of magick that had torn them away from their world.

There were shapes beyond the barrier. Strange geometry. The static was resolving itself into something else. It took the ancient vampire warrior a moment to confirm his worst fear.

A road was appearing in front of them. A road that led up a steep hill to the top of a plateau, where a city of whitewashed buildings and church steeples overlooked the dusty plains. The architecture was Spanish. Another piece of the old world patched together in the hellish puzzle being built in this one.

“No, no, no!” Sophie roared, screaming at the city that resolved itself in their path. “What do we do now?” she cried, turning to Kuromaku, pale and quivering. “What do we do?”

He grabbed her elbow and propelled her back toward the Volkswagen, where Antoinette sat staring out the window at the Spanish city on the plateau.

“We hurry,” Kuromaku told Sophie as he got her into the car and then climbed in after her. “We move as fast as we can and we get to the other side of this town.”

“What if it doesn’t end there? What if we can never reach the edge in time?” she asked as she started the engine, her voice a frightened rasp.

Kuromaku did not turn toward her and he did not respond. The words he had in mind would not have comforted her. For there was only one answer, really. If they could never manage to reach the end before another city appeared, then eventually there would be no world to go back home to.

The tires squealed as they tore off up the winding road toward the city high above. The night sky in this new landscape had only just begun to turn orange and there were people on the streets, panicked faces turned to the sky in terror.

Here, the horror was just beginning.

Agamemnon stood at his usual post in front of the door to The Voodoo Lounge. An old tune by Blues Traveler leaked from the club out onto the street, but there was nobody there to hear it, no one to be drawn into the place by the lure of the music. In all the time he had worked the door, deciding who could enter The Voodoo Lounge, and removing those whose time it was to leave, Agamemnon had never seen the street so quiet.

No
, he thought.
It isn’t just the street. It’s the city. The whole damn world, for that matter.

The enormous man felt a twist of something in his gut, a feeling so unfamiliar he didn’t even know if he could call it fear. New York City still gleamed with neon life, the trains still ran underground—he could hear them screaming up at him through gratings in the sidewalk—and there were still cabs and cars out on the street. Yet, though it was a beautiful night, he had seen very few people walking. Many stores and restaurants had shuttered early, their windows dark.

Still, Agamemnon raised his chin and kept his arms crossed. He had a job to do. Despite the quiet of the streets, there were plenty of people jammed into The Voodoo Lounge. Regulars, mostly, looking for company, frightened to face the uncertainty of the world alone. All over the city, Agamemnon figured people were glued to their television sets, glancing warily out their windows from time to time, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Waiting to find out if they needed to run.

Or if there was anywhere left to run to.

The crowd of regulars inside The Voodoo Lounge was uncharacteristically quiet. Even the music was turned down lower than usual, on account of the TV set behind the bar being turned up. It did not matter what channel was on now. It was not just the news channels anymore . . . with the possible exception of the kids’ shows, every single station had coverage of the crisis.

In front of the door, out on the sidewalk, Agamemnon tried not to listen, tried to let the noise of the city and the low music from the club drown it out. But the city was too fucking quiet. New York City had fallen into a hush, as if the five boroughs were holding their collective breath.

“Hey.”

Panic shot through him and Agamemnon clapped a hand to his chest, making a fist with the other one as he whirled around to find his boss, Cole Bradenton, standing behind him. Bradenton raised both hands in surrender.

“Whoa, relax, man.”

“What’s wrong with you, Cole, sneaking up on me like that?” Agamemnon snapped. He sniffed, glancing at the sidewalk, embarrassed that he had been so easily spooked. “Made me jump out of my skin.”

“I’m sorry. Really.”

The sincerity in Bradenton’s voice was unsettling. Agamemnon glanced up at his friend and employer and saw that Bradenton’s face seemed even thinner than usual, and the Chinese dragon tattooed on the man’s throat undulated as Bradenton swallowed several times in quick succession.

“What is it?” Agamemnon asked.

“Maybe you oughta come in now. We’ve got all the customers we’re going to get tonight,” Bradenton told him.

For a long moment Agamemnon glanced along the quiet street and the neon skyline above. Truth was, he would rather have stayed out here. As unnerving as the desolation was, it was better than having to look into the anxious faces of the club’s patrons. But when Bradenton reached up to put a hand on his arm, the massive bouncer reached up to touch the scar on his face—for some reason it ached today—and turned to follow him back inside.

The regulars gathered within all had drinks in their hands or on the bar in front of them. Some of them—screw the ordinance—were smoking cigarettes as they pressed into the crowd clustered together so that they could see the television. Someone probably should have shut off the music—nobody was paying attention to it and they were all straining to hear the TV—but apparently they were so wrapped up in it, none of them had thought of it yet.

The television mounted above the bar showed a series of images that Agamemnon had trouble making sense of. Paris. The Eiffel Tower. File footage of people walking along the Seine on a warm, sunny day. And then images of armed soldiers and military vehicles lined in front of one of those huge walls that had blocked off the outside world from the cities and towns that had gone missing.
Slushwalls
, Agamemnon had named them, though he kept the word mainly to himself. They looked like the gray, filthy slush on the sidewalk after a New York snowstorm. But you could sort of see through them, like they were a veil or something, except it never seemed real, what you saw on the other side, because it looked like there was just nothing at all.