Slayer - Death Becomes Him Part 18

"Roxy."

"In a minute, Gram!"

The character was standing inches from her, Edna saw, watching the surge of take-ons from his dark height.

Almost as if he were antic.i.p.ating something. Or someone. When his eyes narrowed on the last of the take- ons, Edna looked.

Trouble.

The blonde man was slickly casual to board. Man? Boy, really. He had skin like a Greek statue. You didn't see too many young people with perfect complexions like that. It shone like ice where it poked out of his smooth, flared-collared leather coat. Wraparound Ray-Bans hid the top half of his face and the bottom half was a ma.s.s of white grinning teeth filed to deadly points. A vicious joker's mouth. Bones chittered out of his overpunctured earlobes and trickled along his neck like meatless fingers.

"Roxy, let's go!" Edna pulled her grandchild up.

"But I didn't get--"

"Never mind." Edna drew Roxy under her arm and turned around.

The man, the tall one, filled the aisle in front of them. >From behind, Edna had a perfect view of the mangled ma.s.s of leather coat hanging from his shoulders and the glistening, greasy witch's hair tumbling to his waist.

The blonde man made of leather and steel came abreast with the witch-man, their shoulders nearly touching.

They faced opposite, and yet their heads turned at exactly the same instant, eyes sidling to meet. It made Edna think of a secret agents' rendezvous in a spy thriller, or maybe something from one of those disgusting modern movies, just before the two enemy punks disembowel each other with stilettos.

Edna pulled her grandchild close and held her breath.

The blonde man pushed his shades down his nose; his silvery eyes glittering like steel stars. "Hey there, jelly bean," he said by way of some kind of greeting.

The man who looked like a witch said, "Stone Man."

Blondie sneered, "You a dead man." "I know that, Einstein. So are you."

"Cute, real cute, man. You gonna go down, man--you and your b.i.t.c.h and your f.u.c.kin' mouth too, man. You got that?"

"Whatever you want, you obsolete little punk. When I'm finished here, we'll have it anywhere you want it."

Blondie grinned with his mouthful of Halloween teeth. "I want it right here, f.u.c.kface."

The witch's hair actually bristled, spiking like dangerous quills; his mouth was suddenly deep with teeth.

"Draw that thing here, Stone, and I'll shove the blunt end of it up your a.s.s."

Blondie's grin melted away into a soundless snarl.

"You wouldn't, though."

"Sure I would."

"No. You wouldn't."

"Why wouldn't I?"

"Because you're outnumbered, Stone." The witch smiled and took Blondie by the wrist as Blondie gasped and tossed his head right, left, right. Snow White, magically summoned, stood at Blondie's other side, her hand knotted around his wrist. And though she looked like no more than a child of seventeen years of age, Blondie's arm seemed to be locked in place, as if what held to him had a grip of pure iron.

"Lemme go!" Blondie shouted.

The witch only nodded at Snow White. She smiled. Together they began to crank Blondie's arms against his spine in solid wrestling-winning chickenwings.

Blondie snarled. His face was full of the light of pain. "Let go of me!"

"No," said the witch.

Roxy gasped in Edna's hold. "Way cool, Gram!" her little voice scorched Edna's cheek. "Vampires!" Edna only held to her grandchild, hated the sub, this city, her own helplessness. Between them were mashed Roxy's horrible novels. Roxy laughed. "It's just like in the books..."

"Let me go! Get your red b.i.t.c.h off me! Let go! Let GOOOO!"

Blondie thrashed, but he was powerless to break their combined grip on his arms. "Keep it up, punkface,"

the witch rasped as he cranked the boy's arms an inch further, "and we'll be sending you home to the Father sans arms."

"Eat yourself!"

The witch and Snow White cranked Blondie's arms an agonizing unnatural inch farther. Blondie began to made a sound like a duck being stoned to death.

"Say 'uncle'," chided Snow White.

"Eat each other!"

Another inch. Bones began to squeal alarmingly. "UNCLE, UNCLE, UNCLE...!" wailed Blondie.

They let up a little. Blondie gasped and sagged between his two tormentors. Snow White dabbed playfully at the shining track of drool on his chin. "Good boy," she said. Then her touch turned wicked and she gripped his chin in her long black lacquered fingernails. "You are a good boy, aren't you?" A trickle of blood ran from Blondie's chin, gaining strength when Snow White forcefully nodded his head. "I do hope so. You don't want to know what I do to bad boys."

Yet it was the witch that Blondie turned frenzied eyes on. "He wants you, man, and you better know it! He wants your f.u.c.kin' head bad, man!"

The witch sighed. "Really, Stone? Thank you for that enlightenment. What would I do without him, Sister Teresa?"

"I honestly don't know, my knight."

"Reeeal bad, man!" Blondie's shades were askew; his hair was crazy; he looked utterly possessed. "And I'm gonna get it for him, man! I ain't no t.u.r.dface no more! I'm a big man now! You lookin' at the next Covenmaster, man!"

The witch shook his head. "Good G.o.d, I know Amadeus is mad, but I didn't know he was just plain stupid."

Blondie's eyes bulged in mindless rage.

The iron worm whistled alarmingly and the witch tipped his chin at Snow White. "Would you do the honor of disarming the big man here, Sister Teresa?"

"Of course, my knight." Edna expected a stiletto, a Buck knife at most. Not this. Snow White pa.s.sed the narrow body of steel to the witch. Not a toy, Edna could see that. Not a prop, either. The commuters' eyes turned down respectfully, inward or into laps, in steeled expectation of the blood and screams which must come, making themselves cold and prepared for it.

Blondie only screamed laughter, his tongue lolling like a rabid dog. "Go on, jelly bean, go for it! Go on, man, because, man, you ain't gonna get a second take!"

The witch's eyes narrowed to b.l.o.o.d.y slits. He forced Blondie down into his seat.

"Wa.s.samatta with you, man?" Blondie screamed as his shiny empty eyes rolled up to meet those of the witch. "You f.u.c.kin' chickens.h.i.t or sumpin'? COME ON, MAN! DO IT, MAN! DO IT!"

But the witch only leveled the sword at Blondie's throat, the tip caressing his collarbone, narrow blue ice catching the light of the florescents above. "I want you to live, big man," said the witch, his voice huge and uncoiling in this small place. "Live, Stone. Live to bring the Father this message: tell him Debra is coming back, and tell him she's mad as all h.e.l.l and she's going to kick his a.s.s all over Creation. Tell him that, big man."

Like a kid, Blondie stuck out his tongue.

"Big man," whispered the witch, "the Coven's going down and you're going down with it." He stepped back gracefully, almost catlike, a dance, the sword pointing at the punk's heart, his eyes unwavering, cold. "And by the way--do yourself the courtesy of staying on this car until the next station, Stone, or I'll be sending your empty, brainless skull back to Amadeus in a box."

Blondie hissed like a vampire in one of Roxy's books.

Then Snow White pulled the witch down onto the platform with her and promptly slammed closed the sub door.

Blondie slouched in his seat, seething like a bemused brat. He began to methodically ravish his fingernails, snarling at anyone who dared meet his gaze.

In a moment the car would snort and pick itself up along the line, burrowing into darkness. Edna sat down and pulled Roxy to her. She realized it was too late, the line already whining, the worm awakening. They would ride it to the next station and there they would get off, escape this underworld of sword-wielding maniacs and call Brady to come get then. Anything but to be buried alive here any longer with the mad and the monstrous.

Blondie snarled in his seat and lapped at his bloodied fingertips.

G.o.d, the world was full of monsters, Edna Filmore was convinced of it, utterly convinced.

Down here, no one looked twice at them, even when they stopped in the middle of the terminal and turned to study the wall together. All white tile like some universal latrine. The dull little lights burned ineffectually high overhead, and under them Teresa began a ritual dance of hands across the hard scales of the tiling.

Alek touched the wall further up. "Nothing here."

"Give me the map."

He pulled it out of his coat and let her take it and spread it against the wall. She traced a penline with her painted fingertip. She shook her head, tossed her long loose hair back. "We are not yet there, caro."

"Far?"

"Not very," she said, rerolling the map.

The white tunnel ebbed downward and came out in a maze of corridors pitched in darkness under their mostly broken lighting. Here the emptiness lay like a spell, and though there were still posters, the walls were in fact made up mostly of arcane gang graffiti. At the foot of a dead escalator, as frozen as a dinosaur made of metal bones, they stopped.

"Here," Teresa said.

"There's nothing here." Alek stared at the flank of mocking white wall.

Teresa unrolled the map once more, studied it. "Byron," she whispered, "what the f.u.c.k were you on...oh h.e.l.l."

"What?"

"We're not at the right elevation. Too high. There must be another floor."

"There is no other floor. This is the sub for G.o.d's sake."

"Collapse and surface deposits then." She looked up scrupulously. "There must have been a quake." He touched the wall as if he could know by touch if the Chronicle rested there beneath the mortar and rock.

"This is useless. Let's go."

"I want to know the story," she complained.

"There's no one to ask."

"We'll ask him."

Her cattishly aglow eyes cut through the darkness to a corner bench and its token hobo, his overstuffed shopping cart at his side, his folded blankets of newspaper on the floor, ready for use against the night's subterranean chill. All of it like a Rockwell piece turned dark.

"Don't," Alek told her, suddenly and completely afraid. "You can't."

"Of course I can," she said. "Don't you know? Old men and young girls." She moved purposely toward the hobo and Alek followed dutifully behind, armed with words that disappeared when the hobo folded down the comics page he was reading and eyed them both. Alek saw a scraggle-bearded mouth part in surprise at the pale, beautiful little doll-like woman watching him in her soft black halo of tangled hair and china-white face.

"Well, now," he said.

"h.e.l.lo," said Teresa.

The hobo smiled and scratched at his shadow. The faded flannel-grey eyes inched upward to find Alek.

"Yours, fella?"

"Yes," said the girl.

"Lovely thing." He brushed the loose threads of black over her brow, chucked her under the chin.

"Daughters always are."

"No," she said. "I'm not his daughter. His sister, his lover, more."

The hobo frowned, then laughed. Here in this place below the earth in the dark and the tedium and the loss without sense or end, her story was funny. "Who're you, dolly?"

"Something very unlike you." She tilted her head like a bird of prey. "We seek the lower level here and the door through which we might find it. Have you seen it?"

The hobo's eyes grew lazy and unblinking. He did not flinch at her words. "A door into the deep earth."

"Yes. Where is the floor that was below us?"

For the first time Alek really saw the hobo: grey skin and eyes the same. His face was whorled as if the weight of flesh and time was too great for his bones to withstand. He spied the naked skull in the hollows of the man's eyes, the cavities of his cheeks. "I remember a door," he said.

She slipped up into his lap and be received her as easily as a grandfather. "Tell me the story about the door."

The hobo coughed, sputtered against the web of phlegm in his lungs. He pet her head like a favorite child.

"Time was, the door was open to below, where the beast usta run, back when the city was beautiful and thought it would go on forever. And in that time, was me and my brother Davey. We worked the rails below and we was the d.a.m.n best and the d.a.m.n finest. And we weren't 'fraid like them all, 'cause the line ran and we ran and the d.a.m.n fool city ran, and it was all gonna run forever, you know."

He paused, as if for effect.

"And then?"