Kill the Dead (35 page)

A series of leg-bone chandeliers runs the length of this
tunnel. There are niches carved in the walls and lined with bones. Some niches hold skulls. Others have vases or burned-out candelabras. There’s a huge bone crucifix at the first tunnel junction. The skeleton Jesus is André the Giant-size. He has to have been wired together from the bones of two or three bodies. Someone’s attached articulated hand bones to skulls and suspended them around Jesus’ head like graveyard cherubs.

Most of the Drifters are headed up and out, the opposite of where we’re going. There are thousands of them. They fill the tunnels we’re in and every other tunnel we pass. The only reason Johnny and I aren’t crushed by all the bodies is that there’s a lot more room down here than on the pumping-station floor.

Very few of the Drifters even notice us. I relax. Stark’s fading away fast. I don’t have to keep doing things the way he does. I holster the Smith & Wesson.

“I think they brought me up from down here,” says Johnny, and starts down a set of stairs cut into the rock.

The steps lead to a metal catwalk bolted to a wall hundreds of feet over what looks like an underground Grand Canyon. Dozens of other catwalks extend below us and dot the far side of the cavern. How far does this place go down? How many people have died in L.A. altogether? Or died along the river before L.A. was a city, a town, or even orange groves? I never thought about it before seeing the Backbone. Tribal people and travelers have probably been dying here for thousands of years. It’s a whole sister city of corpses and each one of them has a soul bouncing around
inside its leathery hide. There have to be a lot of vacancies in Heaven and Hell. Apartment rents must be great.

Johnny steers us off the catwalk and into another tunnel. There’s a strange sharp light ahead. It slices through the cavern’s internal atomic glow like a laser beam and plays over the bodies of each passing Drifter. Something is holding and examining them. The outline gets clearer. It’s a man wearing an insulated suit to hide his body heat from the shamblers. The sharp light is the infrared beam from a set of night-vision goggles.

I open my mouth to yell when something slams into me. All I see are teeth and nails clawing at my face. It’s a Lacuna. Mr. Laser Eyes distracted me from the buckle and the Drifters long enough for one of the smart ones to get ambitious. I smack him against the stone wall with one of the hexes I practiced on Kasabian. It starts to get up, and without thinking about it, I pull the Smith & Wesson and blow its spine out its back with three quick shots.

Shit. I guess there’s more Stark left inside than I thought.

I look for Mr. Laser Eyes, but he’s hauling ass the other way. I grab Johnny and start running.

Laser Eyes has a decent lead on us, but my funny angel vision picks out wisps of his body heat leaking from around the edges of his suit. I keep hold of the buckle with one hand and Johnny with the other. He has a hard time keeping up. I don’t think he’s run anywhere in awhile, but like everything else tonight, he seems to be enjoying himself.

A couple of minutes later, we emerge into another cavern. Big, but not as big as the bottomless sinkhole I saw from the
catwalk. It feels like we’ve run out of the Backbone completely.

The cavern looks like the back of a museum or the world’s biggest junk shop. Johnny wants to stop and stare at things. I have to pull him behind me like a badly trained Chihuahua. We go through a slit canyon made of gargoyles on one side and temple dogs on the other and come around the edge of a stone labyrinth. I let go of Johnny and run for a familiar set of stone steps carved into the rock a hundred yards away.

When I’m in spitting distance of the steps I yell, “Muninn!” and the echo bounces for miles into the distance.

I wait and listen. A sound to my right, coming from behind shelves piled high with melting Mexican sugar skulls.

The little man peeks around the side. He’s holding an impressive iron morningstar over his head.

“You planning on tenderizing some steaks? Are we going to have a barbecue?”

He lowers the weapon.

“Stark? What in the name of all the gods living and dead are you doing here? And how did you end up in the Backbone?”

Mr. Muninn is probably the oldest man in L.A. I hope he is. The guy talks about ice ages the way most people talk about lunch. He’s a merchant to the stars and connoisseurs of esoterica. He can find you anything old, discarded, or forgotten and a few things from worlds I don’t even want to know about.

“I was about to ask you the same thing. Why are you dressed like Diver Dan and giving Drifters physicals?”

Muninn likes silk bathrobes and dapper little suits. Right now he’s dressed in a skintight rubber getup, like something a scuba diver would wear. On his round little body it makes him look like a boiled egg with legs.

Muninn shakes his head, tosses the night-vision gear and morningstar aside. He pulls a bottle and glasses from a shelf and pours a couple of glasses of wine. I go over and sit down across from him.

“You scared the devil out of me, young man. In all the centuries I’ve been looking after the dead, I’ve never encountered another living being. When you introduced yourself with a gun, I should have known it was you.”

“You still haven’t answered my question. What were you doing back there?”

Muninn unzips the top of his bodysuit and takes a gulp of wine.

“I was looking for specimens. You know I collect and preserve ephemera from the world outside of here. When I realized that the Backbone might empty completely, I went looking for a few interesting examples of these lost souls to keep for archival purposes.”

“So what are you, like a caretaker for shamblers?”

“Something like that. The resurrected are technically dead, but still ensouled beings. Someone should look in on them every now and then, don’t you think? Now let me ask you a question or two. How did you find your way into the Backbone and why would you go there? Oh, and there’s the small matter of you not being eaten alive.”

I sniff the wine. Stark wants to drink it, but not-Stark doesn’t and is still annoyed about using the gun. The wine stays put.

“Johnny over there is how I got in.”

I nod toward Johnny as he wanders to where we’re sitting. He’s having a good time looking around. He has a plastic Visible Man model kit in one hand and an old leather-bound dictionary in the other.

Muninn stares at him.

“Hello, my boy. You don’t seem to be alive, but those are interesting choices you’ve made. You wouldn’t happen to be a Sapere, would you?”

Johnny nods and grins, but doesn’t talk. He’s overwhelmed by Muninn’s gewgaws.

“I’ve never really seen one up close before. Saperes, of course, leave the Backbone. They don’t come in.”

“Johnny’s doing me a favor. I’m trying to learn everything I can about Drifters.”

“Why?”

“Because someone is using them as a weapon. And one of them bit a friend of mine.”

Muninn sets down his glass.

“Oh. I am sorry. Is she…?”

“Turned? No. Vidocq has her in the Winter Garden.”

“That’s the best thing for her, I’m sure.”

I look at the table for a minute. My brain is churning with questions and answers that don’t hook up and don’t make any sense.

“Mr. Muninn, do you know what’s happening in the Backbone or up in the city?”

“I’m afraid not. A few of the dead wander out every now and then, but never before in this number. How did you and your Sapere friend find each other?”

“Cabal Ash sent me to his minders.”

“Ah, Cabal,” Muninn says. He chuckles.

“What a charmer. He must be feeling generous these days. He paid off a sizable debt recently. It was very unlike him. My impression was that he’d fallen on some hard times.”

“Did he say where he got the money?”

“It never occurred to me to ask. Do you think he has something to do with our migrating wildebeests?”

“Definitely. I was thinking that he’d released the Drifters to settle some old scores, but if he’s suddenly rolling in cash, maybe he did it for someone else.”

“Who would want that?”

“If I could figure out what they wanted, maybe I’d know who’s doing it. Releasing all these dead fuckers in the tunnels will make it even harder to tell who had a hit out on them and who just didn’t run fast enough. At first I thought this was a Sub Rosa feud that had gotten out of hand, but today I got mugged by a couple of Lacunas and I’m pretty sure the Golden Vigil sent them.”

“That is a strange collaboration.”

“What’s this?” asks Johnny.

He holds up a sculpture that looks like a tarantula with wings.

“That’s a spider deity worshipped by natives on a small island lying between Japan and Russia. They used to capture larger spiders, sew wings onto their backs, and toss them off cliffs so they could fly up to the great Spider Mother in the
sky. The spiders, of course, didn’t fly so much as plummet into the sea. They weren’t a particularly bright people and disappeared along with their island in a volcanic mishap.”

“Has anyone else who had a debt with you paid it off recently?”

“There was a strange one just the other day. Do you know Koralin and Jan Geistwald?”

“Sure.”

“Their son, Rainier, purchased some potions from me a while back. Later, there was some talk that had me concerned about payment, but then he appeared out of nowhere and settled the entire debt with some very lovely Etruscan gold.”

“What’s so strange about that?”

Muninn finishes his wine and pours himself another glass.

“It’s strange because what I’d heard was that the boy was dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Fairly. I’m certain I’d seen young Rainier in the Backbone with my own eyes.”

Johnny is moving around behind us. Pawing through Muninn’s shelves. Knocking things over and laughing at what he finds. Can you give Ritalin to a corpse?

“What was he buying?”

Muninn shrugs.

“An assortment of potions. A few rare plants and extracts. None of it particularly sinister. I got the impression that he wasn’t buying them for himself since he didn’t seem to know what any of the substances were for.”

“I saw the Geistwald kid at his parents’ party just a few
nights ago. Are you sure it was him you saw in the Backbone?”

“As certain as anyone can be in the tunnels. The dead appear and disappear so quickly. But I’d met the boy before and I’m sure it was him.”

“So, if the kid really is dead, then the Rainier who paid you is impersonating him. If he can fool you and the family, he must be using a pretty potent glamour. That’s some tight hoodoo.”

“Maybe not so tight as all that. Some of the potions I sold him, when combined with other more common ingredients, could be used to create a very powerful disguise, more powerful than your average young Sub Rosa could conjure up with simple spoken magic.”

“I’m going to need to talk to him and Cabal. Making glamour for a con man sounds exactly like the kind of job Cabal would be good for. If he paid you off, he’s done some work for someone and it sounds like the fake Rainier has some coin to spare.”

Muninn laughs quietly to himself.

“You’re becoming quite the gumshoe, aren’t you? When Eugène first introduced you, I thought you’d only be good for walking through walls and punching people very hard, but here you are puzzling through clues like a champion. If we were drinking tea, we’d practically be Holmes and Watson.”

“I feel like both these days. I had a kind of accident recently, and there’s a couple of different me’s punching it out in my head. Sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s this better, stronger, smarter me, but even more pissed off and with a massive stick up its ass.”

“And which one of you am I speaking to now?”

“I’m not always sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the Stark me putting all these clues together because whenever it starts, I sort of go out for a mental cigarette and let not-Stark talk.”

“Fascinating.”

There’s a loud crash behind us.

“Sorry,” says Johnny.

“You know if you break the Holy Grail, you have to pay for it, right?”

“Don’t be too hard on him. He’s a lovely boy. Much more interesting than the tall, dark, silent types in the tunnels.”

“What’s driving me crazy is that none of this feels like any of it is getting me any closer to helping Brigitte.”

Johnny asks, “Is she the one you said was bitten?”

“That’s her.”

“Why don’t you just cure her?”

“There isn’t a cure. You told me so yourself.”

Johnny turns and gives me a puzzled look.

“Did I? Wow. I must have really been out of it.”

“You’re saying there’s a cure for a zombie bite?”

“Sure. It’s simple. It’s my blood. Well, any Savant’s blood.”

“What do you do with it?”

Johnny drops a papier-mâché devil’s head he’d been holding and comes to the table.

“It’s super easy. You just mix my blood with a little Spiritus Dei and goofer dust—graveyard dirt—and boil it over a fire made from white oak. Scoop off the clear liquid that floats to the top and inject it into her heart.”

“Johnny, can I have some of your blood?”

He looks at Muninn and me.

“Sure. I’m not using it.”

“I’ll get you a jar,” says Muninn, heading for the shelves. “I believe you have your own knife.”

I get up and let Johnny have the chair. He examines the Visible Man model while I get out the black blade.

“You probably want to cut the femoral artery up here near the thigh.”

He points to the Visible Man’s upper leg.

“If I remember right, there’s a lot of blood in there and the skin is easy to bite through, so it should be easy with a knife.”

“Thanks, Johnny. I appreciate this.”

“It’s okay. You’re fun.”

Muninn comes back with a smooth pearlescent black flask with a gold stopper.

“That looks like it’s worth more than the space program. Don’t you have a regular bottle?”

Muninn shakes his head.

“The boy is right. You’re a fun addition to our collapsing city. If it makes you feel better, consider the vessel a gift for poor sleeping Brigitte.”