We plunged, bucked, gained our feet and braced them. Stood.
In another world.
I looked at the slick, wet pavement, smooth as glass. Exotic heavenly bodies reflected in its surface, but when I looked up, all was matte black. No firmament, neither stars nor neon signs. I realized I was looking down through black glass. And the starry heavens were below us.
I inhaled deeply.
Quick looked up at me with blue eyes paled to mirror silver. I saw myself reflected in them: blond biker chick with icy gray CinSim eyes. Not really me. How would my skittish informer recognize me? I figured it had to be someone from Cicereau's mob. Cesar had tried to have me killed and failed. No one knew that but Ric and Cicereau's people.
Looking around, I heard the hiss of roller blades. Teens in black neoprene jumpsuits whizzed by on their narrow runners, one crouching to cruise between Quicksilver and me.
"Watch it," I yelled after the cheeky speed demon.
"You watch it, biker bitch!" the kid hollered back. "Watch me score rings around you."
Not what I was here for. I ducked into the nearest dark doorway. Two "doormen" stood guard at either side of the entrance: tall, lean figures so cadaverous they looked like candidates for Vegas coroner "Grisly" Bahr.
Even though their stinking breaths were as effectively repellent as laser security beams, we evidently passed muster and went through the doors. A flash indicated I had been photographed. Quick squeezed his eyes half shut. Don't modern security measures make your blue eyes blink?
My own eyes, with the gray contact lenses acting as indoor sunglasses, scoped out a mixed bag of supernatural sleazes at the crowded bar. They were all checking me out, visible drool decorating the corners of their mouths. No other women here. I retreated, Quick doing the back step with me until we were in the eerie, windless echo chamber of the Sinkhole's main drag again. It exhaled the same artificial pumped-in air of the Downtown Experience topside.
I checked the name of the first establishment we had seen, "Mudflaps" Limbo Bar," and joined the oddly silent figures shambling along the street. In the smoky fog, it was hard to make out their faces.
After ten minutes of what felt like walking on a treadmill, we didn't seem to have gotten anywhere. Could this be an outpost of Hell, a true "Limbo" of some kind? If so, the creatures of the underworld and overworld would mingle. One thing made the place really weird: the background chime and chuckle of slot machines was missing. There wasn't a casino to be heard down here. Unreal.
As if responding to my mental critique of the silence, distant wailing instruments began to play. Quick sat on his haunches to bay up at the moon. Well, where a moon would be. I saw someone had turned on a huge blood-red planet of shifting light that bled through our smoke Plexiglas sky like the Devil's nightlight.
Then I spotted a sign in soft white neon: Wrathbone.
This must be the place.
Inside, Wrathbone's was as dark as the Devil's left nostril.
The clientele crowding the bar and tables were a mob of human and unhuman cutthroats ranging from such past masters of villainy and oddity as Jack Sparrow's pirates to werewolf and vampire gangs to the Star Wars cantina denizens. Large white neon hieroglyphs lit the bordering dark brick walls. I didn't want to stare at any one individual or object because I didn't want to encourage attention. I was the most recognizably female person there and one of the few humans.
Maybe the creepiest unhuman in the place was the mummy wearing a black trench coat, felt fedora, dark glasses and black leather driving gloves in the corner.
Was he a Cinema Simulacrum or a Cinema Symbiant? His wrapped linen was wedding-day white and looked as crisp as priest's collar against the black accessories.
Had any of the classic thirties and forties mummy movies featured fashion-conscious mummies in contemporary clothing? No. They were all naked under the wrappings, and this one might be too. The creature lifted a spread-fingered hand to wave me over, hoisting a convivial low-ball glass with the other gloved hand.
A single chick out for the evening in the Sinkhole had a lot to consider.
Was this just a barside come-on or my blind date? Blind he certainly seemed, with those impenetrable glasses and a slit of black for a mouth. How he could sip a drink, I didn't know.
I'd find out soon enough. Besides, of all the unhumans eyeing me hungrily, he looked the least able to bite me. Sitting with him for a while would give me a chance to size up the other customers.
As my eyes adjusted to the low light, the decor became easier to grasp at a glance: what I'd taken for neon tubes were an endless chorus line of luminous skeletons hung with their hipbones at eye height. Some wore tatters of clothing. Some could be still hosting tatters of dried flesh. Tasty.
Yet, with their gaping eyeholes and Jolly Roger grins they seemed a carefree bunch. Their clothing ranged from bandoliers to bandanas and a Hawaiian shirt. The one that wore nothing but a bone necklace looked naked.
Them dry bones also packed a lot of weaponry thrust between ribs and hung from scapulae. I was hoping this was some sort of corny Western bar six-gun guest storage system, but a quick glance at the other patrons assured me that they were all more seriously armed than I was. Chains and shivs and daggers and semiautomatics, oh my.
I decided a mummy in a trench coat couldn't have been packing more than a semiautomatic or a sawed-off shotgun, so I headed for the only friendly face I saw, because it had no expression.
Quicksilver kept at heel all the way to the table while every eye in the place still in sockets shifted to watch us. I wasn't sure whether my dog or I was the bigger attention-getter.
"Grab a seat, doll," the mummy said.
"I'm surprised you can sit. Talk about tightly wrapped," I murmured as I pulled my captain's chair close to the table. Quicksilver stood guard beside me, his head at my shoulder-level.
"I'm not a mummy," the creature said in a flat baritone. "They were even dumber than zombies. Could only travel in that same slow, ineffective lurch. Get them mainlining Red Bull, they'd have had something. As for having mummy sex…You into peeling off Band-Aids forever as foreplay? I didn't think so."
He pulled out a lighter and a cigarette case and soon had a cancer stick twitching between his white-gauze lips. I couldn't help feeling nervous, as if I was watching Dorothy's flammable Scarecrow puffing away.
"Relax, Miss Street," he muttered under his breath and the cover of bluish smoke. "We're the normals here."
I almost recognized the whisper this time, and frowned. "Do I know you?"
He leaned in, extended his free gloved hand and pinched my thigh under the table.
"Ouch!"
Quick growled and snapped, but Cigarette-smoking Man's gloved hand was quicker than a magician's wrist action.
"Oooh," he drawled. "That's my quick-step girl. Glad I saved your, uh, carcass. Can't pinch an inch there. You are one smooth lady."