Then there were the times in my life I had wanted to die.
But that was then and this was now. Things were different-a world of different. The only way I planned on dying now was if I screwed up, and I wasn’t planning to screw up. A weight tackled me from behind. I hit the water, rolled over onto my back, losing a few deep stripes of flesh on my shoulders to revenant claws trying to hold me down. Niko had taught me to break a hold like that and this revenant was no Niko. I dropped the axe, shoved the Eagle under his chin, and put two through the top of his bald head, the color of a toad’s skin. The skull shattered, which staggered it slightly. It was when I put the muzzle of the automatic to its neck and emptied half the clip into it, destroying the spine, that it was blown backward, never to get back up.
I surged to my feet, taking the axe with me, and headed toward about ten of them rushing Robin. Robin tended to have that effect on anyone who crossed his path. They either rushed him to molest him-I was sure that if it was for molesting, he was happy to have it-or to kill him. At least I knew he did have a problem with that last one.
“Why is it when I’m with you,” he remarked calmly as he took two heads in one stroke, “I’m given the tour of New York ’s most odiferous locations? Never are your enemies running perfumeries or fine gourmet chocolate shops. No. Sewers, troll caverns, abandoned asylums full of decomposing corpses, your building’s basement on your laundry day. I still debate to myself which has been the worst.”
“Think of your cat. It’s all for your cat,” I said as I took a head of my own with the axe and finished the clip off on my Eagle into another revenant. I didn’t take the spine out, but I did take both arms. If it wanted to kick me to death or take me out like the world’s biggest snapping turtle, it could go right ahead. And naturally it did. I didn’t have much respect for revenants, and compared to other predators in the city, they weren’t quite as efficient in their murderous ways. But that didn’t mean they weren’t killers or weren’t stubborn enough to come after you if all they were was a torso with one arm left to pull it along.
This time I passed the axe blade through his neck and his head flew into the darkness. All his stubbornness disappeared with it. I waited for more to come boiling out of the darkness in the rear of the hangar, but none did. But I heard something-hissing, groaning, and splashing, and quite a lot of all three. Followed by Robin, I headed into the dark. It was instinctual for people to stay out of the dark; that’s where the bad things were. My human half had outgrown that core of self-preservation a long time ago. Now the dark was where the money was. With the axe in one hand, I pulled my gun back out and used the rest of the clip to fill the roof of the hangar with holes. Daylight streamed in, letting us see better than any flashlight. If it was something we wanted to see.
It wasn’t.
It absolutely, completely was not.
Once… what was I thinking… a thousand times when I was being homeschooled by Niko, he dragged me to museums. If they didn’t have weapons or dinosaurs, I wasn’t much interested. But sometimes things stuck with me, like when your brother lectured you about fertility figures. The combination of horror and boredom etched itself into your brain. One museum statue he’d used had been a Venus. Not the good one, not the naked marble Venus with no arms, but nice breasts. No, he chose a small figure that would fit in your hand. Found in Germany or Austria or someplace with beer, it had a head but no face, and enormous pendulous breasts that hung over an equally enormous and pendulous stomach. The legs were tiny, the arms almost nonexistent. It barely looked human. In fact, it looked like Jabba the Hutt’s girlfriend. It was enough to put off a seventeen-year-old me from trying to get the newstand guy to sell me nudie mags for a week or two.
That little piece of BC art bore one hell of a resemblance to what was squatting in the back of the warehouse… except she had three rows of those huge breasts. She really was the size of Jabba, times two, and she was expelling fully formed and grown revenants through her giant-oh jeez. Okay, now I wasn’t off nudie mags for a week; I was off sex, and that was a much bigger loss.
I’d specifically not wondered where baby revenants came from when we’d gotten out of the Jeep. And here I was, finding out anyway. Ain’t that life? Life and pained eyeballs I suddenly didn’t want anymore. The new revenants would slide out and land in the water, splash feebly for a few seconds, then get to their hands and knees and crawl up the massive form that birthed it and, voilà, baby’s first swallow. Breast feeding, it was a beautiful thing.
Mommy had no legs from what I could tell, and small arms ended in flippers that she flailed around as she hissed at us, then gurgled slowly, “I hunger. Mother hungers.” The milky eyes were fixed on us, the mouth big enough to swallow one of us whole. “So very huuuuungry.” All the new revenants turned toward us, including the one that just plopped out with gnashing teeth and swiping claws, and wet with more than water. Green and black, mucus or slime-whichever, it flew through the air. The smell that went with it was equally as appetizing.
“Yeah. Okay. The miracle of birth.” I slammed a new clip home and tried not to gag. “You take care of this one, Goodfellow. I have some… ah…” Another one came gushing out. Plop. Splash. That was it. Celibacy. The priesthood. That was for me. “Interrogation. I have some interrogation to do. Have fun.”
“What?” Robin sputtered. “You bastard. You’d best not take a single step…”
I’d taken thirty of them before he even said the word. Dashing past me in the opposite direction was Salome. Apparently she liked what she saw a lot more than I had, because I heard her loud and raucous purr all the way back at the front of the hangar where I’d left my Einstein revenant. I’d never heard a happier sound in my life. Damn, she really was a tiny patch of living hell in a rhinestone collar. And I thought I had monster cred.
The extra smart revenant wasn’t where I’d left him. Brains and motivation. Too bad he hadn’t gone to business school. He’d have a corner office by now. It still didn’t take long to find him, though. You could only go so far when you were nothing but a torso and arms. He’d pulled his upper half into a patch of blackness, but I could still smell that distant hint of perfume. A woman had put that on one night, for her husband, her boyfriend, her girlfriend or just for herself, and probably thought for a moment that she was pretty and ready for the night. But it had been the night that had been ready for her.
I reached into the darkness for him, ignored the savage bite on my forearm, and yanked him into the dim light. Once I got him there, I used the barrel of my gun to pry his jaws open and remove my arm more or less intact. Blood probably stained the long-sleeved T-shirt, but that was the great thing about black. It didn’t show blood and it was slimming-a must-own for pudgy serial killers everywhere.
I planted a mud-covered combat boot on the revenant’s chest. “All right, Professor, I was in a damn good mood yesterday. Now tell me why two Kin Wolves and one of your kind cared to blow it to shit.”
It snarled, a show of teeth now broken from the metal of the Desert Eagle, but said nothing. And really it had nothing to lose. It was dead. It might take weeks to get there but even a revenant couldn’t regenerate an entire lower body. So nothing to lose… but something to gain. Pain. Nobody liked pain, not even revenants. Sometimes the threat was enough; other times it wasn’t. I think the woman who’d died in her favorite perfume, the perfume on its breath, would understand that I didn’t give a shit which way this bastard went in that regard. I unsheathed the combat knife, its serrated smile as unrelenting as my own. “Let’s try this again. Who is fucking with my Zen?”