I knock on the door and he answers. I leave my package behind some garbage cans in the hall.
“Good to see you. Please come in,” he says.
I go in and look around for Allegra, but I don’t see her.
“How is she?”
He shrugs.
“Comme ci comme ça.”
“I’m fine.”
It’s Allegra’s voice, coming from the kitchen. She walks in with coffee for her and Vidocq. She offers me her cup. I shake my head.
“I’m okay,” she says. “It’s the clinic that’s ruined.”
“I’m really sorry.”
She sits on the sofa, clutching the cup in her hands.
“I don’t suppose it could have lasted forever. Sooner or later someone would find the place and shut it down. The cops. The Board of Health. Someone. I was just hoping it would last a little longer.”
Vidocq sits down and puts his arm around her. She rests her head on his shoulder. Lifts it off a moment later and looks at me.
“Are you hurt again?”
I pull my coat closed.
“I tripped on a chocolate bunny.”
“I have enough supplies to fix you, you know. And I could use the distraction,” she says.
I shake my head.
“Thanks. Tomorrow.”
“You look worried. Can we help with something?” says Vidocq.
I listen to the door for a minute in case someone walks down the hall. I don’t hear anything.
“I know you lost a lot of gear in the clinic, but remember when Brigitte got bit by the zombie that time and you put her in a kind of coma. What was that?”
“You mean the Winter Garden?” says Vidocq. “You want to put someone to sleep?”
“She’s already kind of asleep.”
“What does that mean?” says Allegra.
I get the chop-shop woman from the hall and bring her inside.
Allegra raises a hand to her mouth when she gets a look at her.
“What happened to her?”
“Yeah, she isn’t pretty, is she?”
She puts her hand on the body’s forehead.
“James, she’s already dead.”
I set the body down on a chair.
“I don’t think so. I think she’s just empty. The body is fine, but there’s no one inside.”
Vidocq and Allegra look at each other for a moment.
Allegra opens the chop shop’s eyes and peers at them. They’re still clear.
“It’s not like I have anything else to do right now. I still think she’s dead, but I can keep her from getting any deader.”
“Thanks. When you’re done, just stick her in a corner somewhere. She won’t be here long. I have to go.”
“Do you need any help?” says Vidocq.
“Lots. But I have a plan. I think. Maybe. I hope. If not, maybe we’ll all get lucky and Hell will survive and I’ll see you there.”
“Why do you think we’re going to Hell?” says Allegra.
“Because you’re my friends.”
It’s 9:50. I head out through a shadow for the Nickel—Fifth Street and Pershing Square.
THE SQUARE IS above street level, so it’s fairly clear of the flooding. There are trees and benches and not much else around us for a giant to crush me with. The monsoons have backed off a little and the rain has gone from pounding to merely drenching.
After everything that’s happened and everything the Shonin told me, I still don’t feel like the thing that came along to destroy the universe. Not that I’d know what that felt like. But I have to believe it would feel like something. Not evil or anger or anything like that. Maybe hunger. A deep-down gnawing hunger that won’t be filled until it swallows all of creation. What do you chase the universe with? Beer or a cold Coke?
I wonder what oblivion will be like? Let’s face it. The chances of everything working out the way I want, the chances of anything I plan working out, are dim at best. Still. What else is there to do? I have a lot to make up for, I guess, even if I never intended to murder everything. Yeah. I thought about it, but I never did it and now I find out I was doing it all along. Funny, the things you find out about yourself. Maybe I should get my aura read or try going macrobiotic. That should take the edge off being a universe killer, right?
I don’t know what to think anymore. If I can’t trust my own past, what can I trust? And don’t say the future because one, there might not be one, and two, how do I know I’m not something else nefarious? A jaywalker or a sleepwalking flimflam man?
I guess I’m supposed to be okay with everything dying. Marcus Aurelius, a guy I read when I was stuck in Hell and finished all the coloring books said, “Death, like birth, is a secret of nature.” Only with birth you get a blanket and a bottle. You get a blanket with death too, but they call it a shroud and everyone else gets the bottle. How am I supposed to be okay with that?
The future is a mess, the past is a wreck, and I’m center stage at the shit storm of the century. I guess I can take comfort in knowing that if it all goes balls up tonight, I’ll be among the first to die and won’t have to see everything gobbled down like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
It’s 9:55.
I take the 8 Ball out of my pocket, toss it up into the air, and catch it a couple of times in my Kissi hand. As it falls, it changes shape too quickly for me to see. I want to look anyway because it’s the last time I’ll see it. I keep tossing it and waiting.
The light in the square goes up a couple of notches. The trees blur and the air turns red. A vault slowly emerges in the air above the treetops. It’s red and wet. Not with rain, but blood. The flesh cathedral encloses half the park, like a Grand Guignol band shell. I don’t know how many bodies hang inside it. The naves stretch back as far as I can see. It’s all of Saint Nick’s victims, plus the Angra worshipers who offed themselves.
Weaving through the suspended bodies are two chop shops. The guy is Shaky. I don’t recognize the scarred woman.
She says, “I told you you should have joined us. All this pain. All this fighting and here we are, just where I told you we’d be.”
I know the voice from our phone chats.
“Deumos? Is that you? Your look finally matches your personality.”
She shakes her head. Her face is split nearly down the middle. Her eyes and lips don’t quite line up right. Her face is a mass of wrong angles.
“I won’t engage with you, Stark. You’re just stalling and you know it’s futile. Just give us the Qomrama.”
Shaky looks a little bruised after his fight with Ruach.
“Don’t waste any more of my time or I’ll kill all of your loved ones and make you watch,” he says.
I toss the 8 Ball one more time.
“You know, I think I can pull Deumos out with this thing. I wonder if I can do any other tricks?”
I touch it to Deumos’s body. The ball glows for a second and stops.
“You see?” she says. “Nothing.”
“I’m not so sure. I think you’re stuck in that body now.”
“What difference does that make?”
“You won’t die like an angel. You’ll die like meat. Like a mortal.”
I check my phone. It’s ten o’clock.
Shaky puts out his hand.
“Now, Abomination. Give it to me or see the young Jade die.”
“Okay.”
I toss it to him. The 8 Ball bounces off his chest and he catches it. Stares at it for a second like he doesn’t quite believe it’s real. Then he smiles, a wild, ecstatic thing. A smile that’s been coming for a billion years.
Shaky holds up the 8 Ball and it sort of unfolds, becomes a hundred different shapes at once. Some alive and some inert. It writhes, spins, flaps, swims, burns, melts. Grows wings, eyes, spines like icebergs, and limbs like dead trees. It does all this at once. I can’t look. It hurts my eyes. It hurts my head, trying to take it all in. But I can see the sky. Lightning flashes and the rift opens again. The rip blacks out stars. Something comes through, and this time it’s not just smoke and bones. It’s fully formed things that are as wild, unidentifiable, and painful to look at as the thrashing 8 Ball. It hurts, but I keep looking.