Hellbent (7 page)

This reminded me I wasn’t just sightseeing. I was looking for a dusty old humidor filled to the brim with magical penis bones.

My unease had not exactly lifted upon finding the bled-out corpse, and now to add to my discomfort I had the nasty suspicion that I was not going to find a dusty old humidor—and if by some amazing chance I
did
locate such an item, it was likely to be empty. The briefest glance around the premises told me that this guy didn’t own anything else worth stealing.

And this was all kinds of problematic. I made a mental note to ask Horace who else knew about the penis bones, and began a systematic-but-speedy search of the place, top to bottom.

I still couldn’t shake that
other
smell, the one I’d picked up outside, before the blood.

Ozone, that’s what it was. The stink of electricity gathering, collecting, and … and … that’s when I noticed that the hairs on the back of my arm were standing up. A fast glance in the bathroom mirror revealed that the stuff on top of my head was likewise coming to attention, creating a fluffy black halo that was neither flattering nor comforting.

Outside, I heard an incongruous rumble. I say it was incongruous because, as I already mentioned, the weather outside was clear as a bell not ten minutes previously. But I know thunder when I hear it, and it wasn’t a car backfiring, or the television—which,
yes, was still playing in the living room. What a fucking waste. Turn off your TV if you’re going to hole up in the “office” and shoot zombies.

I found the remote and turned the TV off to make doubly sure that the ambient noise wasn’t coming from the boob tube. No sooner had the last pixels imploded into a tiny blip of light than the thunder came again. And this time it was much, much closer.

Storms weren’t supposed to move that fast, were they?

In the kitchen, I opened all the cabinets and dumped their contents onto the floor. In the closets, I yanked all the coats and shirts and painfully tacky shoes out into the light and abandoned them. In the master bedroom, I fished under the bed and turned up absolutely nothing I wanted to touch, including a small wet hairball that the kitten had deposited with disgusting recentness.

Nothing, nothing, and nothing.

The humidor wasn’t hiding behind the rows of video games, and there weren’t any bookshelves upon which it might’ve been stashed. Not in the storage closet, not in the garage, which was virtually empty except for the stink of gasoline, paint thinner, and a lawn mower that hadn’t cut anything since Clinton was in office. A few tools were hung up on a pegboard; rusting containers of the previously noted smelly, flammable liquids were lined on unfinished wood shelves; and a washer and dryer were strewn with dirty laundry.

More nothing.

And although it was utterly irrational, at that point I knew a few things—none of them good. Call it that rudimentary psychic sense, call it woman’s intuition, call it a lifetime of bad luck and hard-earned learning experiences … but I knew that not only were the bones absolutely missing, but that whoever had taken them had killed Joseph Harvey.

Okay, so that wasn’t such a leap of logic. But the next part was.

I knew that I needed to get the ever-living fuck out of that house or I was going to die. I was pretty sure I was going to go up in flames, but that’s probably just my subconscious running the numbers: electricity plus flammable liquids, multiplied by the hypothetical possibility of lightning.

I’m no good at math, but I know a very nasty word problem when I see it.

Outside, the night was changing colors—deepening and darkening, and the rumbling from the clouds rolling in was less a crack of thunder than a constant, rolling rumble, increasing incrementally with every second I stood there considering my next course of action.

Was it madness to assume that a freak thunderstorm was homing in on me? Oh yes, of course it was. But I’ll be the first to admit I’m more than a little crazy, and I’ll bet being crazy has saved my ass more times than I can count.

So my next course of action was obvious: Get the hell out of that house.

The kitten sat on the floor eyeing me with unsettling intensity. It was making a request—or trying to burn its little face into my memory, in the event I left it all alone in a house that was mere seconds from going up in a fireball.

“Fuck it,” I declared to the house, the storm, and the kitten.

I grabbed the animal under its belly and whipped it up inside my jacket as I ran.

For something whose life was getting saved, the kitten wasn’t super-grateful. It wriggled and writhed against my left breast, leaving unsightly scratches that itched ferociously. But what was I going to do, leave it there? Not unless I wanted kitten flambé to haunt my nightmares.

I could feel its wet little paws kicking, shoving, and pushing against my shirt. Good thing I was wearing black, though I still
felt like this was an unfair coincidence. If I was going to ruin a shirt with blood, I ought to at least get a meal out of it.

For a split second I considered sucking the blood off the kitten’s feet, and that’s when I realized it’d been a while since I’d eaten, and that sometimes I am honestly too gross for words when I’m hungry.

Even a sense of imminent mortal peril cannot override my stomach, I swear.

But the imminent mortal peril was making me paranoid and light-headed. I stumbled through the house, which was now almost entirely dark—since I’d turned off the television—and slipped in a trailing tributary of blood that had oozed out into the hall.

I’d told the kitten that the body was getting cold, but that’d been an exaggeration, and I suppose we both knew it. The guy hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. I had just barely missed something violent, by the skin of my teeth. I wanted to ask the small cat, “What happened here, anyway?” but my psychic powers don’t extend to animal ken. It’s not like it would’ve mattered.

Finally I located the front door and fumbled with it until I had the dead bolt turned. I yanked the door open, except that there was one of those stupid dinky chains—so I ripped the door halfway off its hinges instead, breaking that dinky chain and flinging myself outside at a dead run.

Above, the sky had sunk down low and close, and the death-black clouds weren’t just rolling, they were boiling. And the ozone … if that’s what it was … had grown so thick I could hardly breathe. It felt something like getting a hearty, inadvertent whiff of champagne bubbles, but without the happy promise of alcohol to follow. The air was sharp and hot, and heavy, as if the atmosphere
itself were fighting me—trying to keep me inside, or keep me from running.

I ran anyway, and when I’d barely reached the end of the driveway where the mailbox leaned at a rakish angle, a blinding column of jagged white heat snapped down from those boiling clouds and struck the satellite dish on the roof. The ensuing crack sent shrapnel of metal, plastic, and roofing tiles flying in every direction, and it made my ears ring all the way to my brain. I staggered and caught myself on the mailbox. I used it to right myself, and then to launch myself forward again—away from the sizzling aroma of tar and metal.

The second strike took the garage, and the fireball that went up when the lightning met the paint thinners and the gasoline shoved me face-forward into a ditch beside the road—literally lifting me off my feet and throwing me. I landed on the other side, in the ditch, in a fetal-crouch roll, beside somebody else’s mailbox. I couldn’t hear much, but I could hear windows breaking and fire coughing. I hate that noise, that whooshing gasp fire makes when it’s so big it takes all the oxygen and turns it into a brilliant plume.

Don’t tell
me
lightning never strikes twice.

No longer dark and sleepy, the hill and its sparse neighborhood were lit up like lunch hour in the glowing red-and-gold strobe. The explosion was distilling itself down to an ordinary house fire—not that it mattered to all the blast-sheared trees within fifty yards. But hey, the fire probably wouldn’t spread since there was nothing close to feed it.

My knees were shaking as I hauled myself up, using the across-the-street neighbor’s mailbox as a temporary crutch. I could see the fire licking up the walls, chewing on the roof, and gnawing into the interior of Joseph Harvey’s house, but I couldn’t hear any of it. I couldn’t hear anything but a high-pitched hum,
and the dull, faraway chimes that I finally recognized as sirens. They sounded unreal and muffled, like toy police cars held underwater.

I shook my head, which didn’t help. It only made everything hurt, in addition to the ringing and humming. Well, if I hadn’t tried it, I wouldn’t have known, now would I? And if nothing else, the action got me moving again.

Sticking to the road would’ve been a bad idea. Emergency vehicles were on their way. I didn’t want to be spotted or, heaven forbid, assisted. I just wanted out of there, and back to my car, so I could flee for Seattle before anyone could stop me and ask what I was up to.

I’m not sure what I was so afraid of. It’s not like anyone could’ve reasonably accused me of blowing up a house by striking it with lightning. Twice. I’m awesome, don’t get me wrong, but weather manipulation is altogether outside my sphere of influence. My roommate Ian can do it a little, but not (so far as I know) with the kind of laser precision that I’d just seen demonstrated.

And no. Not for one brief, sparkling moment did I honestly think I’d just witnessed some colossal coincidence.

I went looking for magical items. The items weren’t there, and the owner had been freshly murdered. Mere minutes later, his house blew up. None of this—not in any arrangement whatsoever—added up to a coincidence. I wasn’t sure what it
did
add up to, but my gut told me it couldn’t be good.

I took off at a brisk lope behind the neighbor’s house and in the general direction of my car, and it wasn’t until I was leaning against that car, fishing around for my keys, that I remembered I hadn’t escaped the Harvey household alone.

The kitten, not being completely stupid, had crawled down inside the interior pocket of my jacket—a pocket I’d been only dimly aware the jacket possessed, presumably intended to stash a
cell phone or a pack of cigarettes. Well, it stashed a four-footed hitchhiker almost as easily. The poor thing had curled itself up tighter than a snail. It made a whimpering noise when I poked at the lump of its rear end.

“Still alive, huh?” I asked it, and my voice sounded funny to my stopped-up ears. “That’s good, I guess. Wouldn’t want to explain a mashed kitten to the dry cleaner, anyway.”

It whimpered again.

I let myself into my car and shut the doors, cracking the window just enough to listen for sirens. I wanted to know when they arrived so I could sneak out past them. Two fire trucks, a cop car, and an ambulance all went speeding by, scooting around the turnoff and trundling up the hill.

I yawned to pop my ears, in case that would work.

It did, but not very well.

Satisfied that no more emergency vehicles were immediately forthcoming, I rolled up the window and reached into my pocket. I extracted the kitten and held it up so it was facing me. It was small enough to use my palm for a recliner, and its bloody paws hung over the edge of my thumbs.

“Okay … 
you
,” I said to it.

It blinked slowly.

I briefly and temporarily held it by one hand while I reached up with the other, turning on the car’s dome light. Then I upended the kitten, got a good look at its undercarriage, and finally had a pronoun.

“You’re a boy,” I informed him. “Congratulations.”

He squeaked a meow at me. It was a tired meow, and maybe a hungry one. Definitely a nervous one.

I agreed with the sentiment, whatever it was. “You and me both, kid. Christ, you’re filthy. You smell … delicious. But don’t worry, we won’t go there. Instead,” I informed him, setting him
down on the passenger’s seat and randomly trusting that he wouldn’t take off, “we’re going to go back to the hotel. And you’re going to get a bath. If you want to survive the night, you’re going to have to smell a little bit less like a snack.”

He gave me the closest thing to a shrug I’ve ever seen an animal attempt, and curled up in a ball right there on the seat. But I noted that he dug his claws in, so as not to slide off during the car ride. Good kitty. Or at least, somewhat intelligent kitty.

Back at the hotel, I made a point to let myself in via a rear entrance—away from any pesky reception desks, where employees might want to know why the hell I looked like I’d just survived a Patriot missile strike … and oh yeah, why I was carrying a bloody kitten. Sure, I could protest that the blood on the kitten belonged to someone else, but I doubted that’d do much to ease anybody’s mind.

It wasn’t until I was halfway down the hall that I saw the blood on my boots, along with enough mud to build a hut. I removed the boots and held them with one hand, and the kitten with the other, and I made it back to my room with a giant sigh of relief—and the sudden realization that the kitten had peed inside my jacket.

No good deed goes unpunished, et cetera.

This also reminded me that I didn’t have anyplace within the hotel room that a kitten might use as a toilet, but since he’d already peed, I figured that a few kitten turds wouldn’t be the end of the world. They’d be more like the shit frosting on a crap cupcake of a day, really, and I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I was tired, and my head hurt, and I wished I had some blood—human or otherwise—but there wasn’t any handy except a few drops floating around in a skinny kitten, and I didn’t actually need it. I don’t drink very often in my old age, but sometimes it’s comforting and it’s just what I want.

But we can’t always get what we want.

Instead we get to turn the bathroom sink into a kitten spa, much to the indignation of the animal in question. When I was finished with him, the water looked like bloody tea, and I came this close to giving it a sip, but that would be pathetic—and I wasn’t quite desperate enough to be pathetic.

I towel-dried the kitten, used one of the hotel coffee mugs as a water bowl for him, then I took a long, hot bath.