I get the door shut and chained and I’m just about to fire up the corporate intranet and look up the regulations for dealing with the metabolically challenged when the jaws of the nearest stiff begin to open. His cheeks distend and something begins to pulse in his throat—almost as if he’s getting ready to vomit. Except he’s dead. (Actually he’s been soul-dead for weeks, if not months, but that didn’t stop him walking around.) Now it looks as if the death of the body isn’t any kind of obstacle to indigestion. I watch, repelled, as something forces its way out through the corpse’s lips: a pale white head, eyeless, with whiskery antennae, followed by a segmented body with tiny little legs. It isn’t dead, and I can feel its tiny little mind searching—an atom of desperate awareness, eternally hungry, seeking a soul to save—
I rush to the desk and grab the shitty Dell laptop, moving so fast I’m not consciously aware of my actions until afterwards. Then I look at the splattered mess I’ve created, and the bodies, and an abrupt wave of nausea seizes me. I make it to the toilet ahead of the dry heaves, then realize with a sense of near-panic that there are two parasites and I only had the one computer, and now it’s all broken and covered in blood and bits of the giant isopod from hell. (Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)
Luckily there’s a trash can in the bathroom. I carry it back into the hotel room, where the second savior is just pulling its whip-tail free of its deceased victim’s jaws. It leads me a merry chase around the desk for a minute or two, but I have the tongs from the hotel ice bucket, and it does not; eventually I get it in the can, and weight the lid down with one of the missionary’s pistols.
I sit down, breathing heavily. This is not good. Above and beyond the whole self-defense thing—and I’m going to sleep badly over that, even though they were soul-dead to begin with—it opens a giant can of worms. Someone sent these things to…well, given what was on their tiny minds I’m fairly sure they weren’t just going to try and sell me a subscription to The Watchtower. But what worries me is who sent them. It appears Golden Promise Ministries have been alerted to my presence.
Which in turn leads me to wonder: What if my tigers have run into a big game hunter?
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON. THE SKY IS THE COLOR OF STONE AND occasional fat snowflakes drift below the street lights, glistening as they melt before they reach the sidewalk.
Johnny has spent the day patrolling the exit routes he has carefully laid out for Persephone. Tomorrow, if all goes well, he’ll see about dropping in on one of Schiller’s church’s public services; but first it’s his job to ensure that Persephone’s needs are covered.
Each of the rented apartments is kitted out with the necessities for either a short or a long stay: fast food, sterile prepaid mobile phones, a couple of off-the-shelf outfits—weekend-casual and office drag—and medical kits. But that’s not enough. He’s also keeping an eye on the safe houses, checking for surveillance, nosy neighbors, environmental hazards like crack houses and off-duty cops. And he’s checking out each house in turn, driving from one to the next and watching from down the street. Lamplighting, the spooks call it; attending a single safe house is usually rated a full-time job, but Johnny’s got three lamps to tend, in different cities. He’s driven maybe two hundred miles today, back and forth between Denver and Colorado Springs and Pinecrest, and he’s almost sufficiently fucked off with the job to phone that geeky bureaucrat guy and set him to work. (Howard wants to help? Let him.)
He’s driving back towards the safe house in Washington Park when he realizes that he’s being tailed.
It’s not a new sensation for Johnny, but it’s always unwelcome. A crawling on the back of the neck, awareness that there are at least one set of headlights behind him that are keeping their distance—he experiments, taking an exit fast and a right turn on a red light, and the lights follow.
Johnny’s lips peel back silently in something like a smile. This boring legwork is his least favorite part of the job (though he’d rather die than admit as much to the Duchess while she’s depending on him). He’s more than ready for a rumble, though he’s professional enough not to seek one out while he’s on a job, but if someone asks him for one—Got you, my son, he thinks at the lights in his mirror, and looks for a suitable location.
He passes an alleyway between two shuttered brick-and-steel shops in a block that shows little sign of night life. Half a mile later Johnny circles and turns back towards it, slowing. He indicates in plenty of time, then noses into the alley and kills his lights. His vehicle is a stick-shift pickup with a big block engine, selected specifically for its ability to carry out maneuvers like the one he’s about to pull; and he’s already disabled the airbags and the reversing light. Johnny believes in living dangerously.
There are lights in his mirror, approaching. Still rolling forward, Johnny slams the truck into reverse, guns the engine, and smokes the clutch. The truck lurches to a standstill and rolls backwards without stalling. It’s got enough torque to haul a ten-ton trailer; the clutch is probably glowing cherry-red. There’s a crunch, more felt than heard, and he lets his headrest absorb the impact. Then he’s out of the cab and into the alley before the engine stops.
He finds the driver of the crunched car beating back the airbag and struggling with his door, swearing. Johnny tuts admiringly as he scans the passenger seats and the alleyway for spectators; the pickup’s trailer hitch has done a real number on the radiator of the tail car—a Neon, now bleeding out between a pair of overflowing dumpsters. He yanks on the door handle with his left hand, holding his weapon where the driver can see it. “Hands on top of the wheel,” he says, taking care to speak clearly and loudly. “Where I can see ’em.”
The driver freezes, an expression of profound disgust on his rabbitlike face. “Jesus, Johnny,” he whines, “whatcha have to do that for?”
Johnny squints at the driver. “Patrick?” Sixty-something, with white receding hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s a dead ringer for a certain former associate of the Network. Johnny takes a step back—ensuring his knife is out of range of a quick grab—glances up and down the alleyway, then turns back to the driver. “Small world, mate.” An old and unwelcome memory prompts him: “Show us yer tongue.”
“Yer wot?” Patrick looks genuinely perplexed.
“Like this.” Johnny sticks his tongue out at Patrick, rolls it. “Do it. Now.”
“Sure.” Patrick looks disgusted, but does as he’s told; his tongue is clearly normal. “What’s that about, for the love of God?”
Johnny sighs. “Why were you following me?”
“I just saw you drive past and recognized—”
“No, Pat. I don’t have time. Listen, I’m doing you a favor just letting you talk. But I don’t have forever. Tell me the truth, okay? Who are you working for?”
Patrick’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. For a moment, under the shadows cast by the street lights, he looks a century older than his age. “The Nazgûl.”
Johnny wears a couple of small wards in a leather bag on a cord round his neck, tucked under his check shirt. One of them should—just over ninety-four percent of the time, to within two standard deviations—prick him when someone is lying to him with malice in mind. It is quiescent in the face of Patrick’s quiet despair. “Well, mate, this is yer lucky day.” Johnny lowers his knife.