MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (41 page)

Ryder and Chuck were alive, but they might not be for long. It was entirely possible Levi would kill Hogg only to find his friends dead at the hands of the raging Cain. Murdered and left to die in a pool of their own blood. He could always gamble: just kill Hogg and hope for the best. The Mudman could stop Hogg or he could save Ryder and Chuck. But he couldn’t do both. Not with any degree of certainty. Despite Hogg’s obvious cowardice, Levi was positive he would have some trick up his sleeve—a man as cunning as Hogg would never be completely defenseless. Killing him would take time, precious time.

Time Ryder and Chuck didn’t have.

The angry specters screamed and cheered in support of the Hogg-murdering option—the brand in his chest burned with the fury of a personal sun.

Hogg was responsible for all of this,
the voices pleaded. He’d killed all those men and women so many years ago. He was an unrepentant, black-hearted murderer who, if left alive, would surely go on to cause more trouble and inflict more death. What was two lives against the fate of so many more? Justice demanded Levi kill the doctor. Everything in him demanded he kill the doctor.

Something Hogg had said earlier tickled at the back of Levi’s mind.
“Perhaps in that crude brain of yours you’ve convinced yourself that you came to rescue the girl, but the fact that you chose to hunt me over saving her shows the true intentionality of your twisted heart.”
And here Levi was, standing at a crossroad with exactly that choice before him. Pastor Steve’s words followed:

“
Anger and vengeance are like a fire, Levi, and like fire, they burn indiscriminately. You might get your vengeance, only to find yourself consumed and destroyed in the process. At the end of the day, you need to make the choice you can live with—and sometimes the choice you can live with isn’t the one that makes any sense at all from a worldly perspective …”

Hogg reached the emergency exit.

Levi let him.

The Mudman wheeled around, leaving the doctor to make his getaway, and charged toward the picture window. He didn’t look back as he smashed through the glass like a cannonball and plummeted to the warehouse floor, ready to save his friends.

Had he made the right decision? He didn’t know. But he’d made a decision he could live with, and for the first time in a long, long time, his heart felt light and easy.

THIRTY-ONE:

Resurrection

Ryder absently ran a hand over the surface of the stone table beneath her, its texture slick and smooth like polished glass. She didn’t know how long she had left to live, but she knew it wouldn’t be long now. A double handful of minutes, tops. For one, they’d stopped drugging her. Said she needed to be awake for the ritual to work. Two, the Kobock shaman—the leathery, old bastard sporting a patchwork cloak of what Ryder assumed was skin—was busy working away at a cauldron, brewing some rancid soup, which burned her nose hairs. A sweet and sour stink like old vomit and even older roadkill.

She craned her neck and glanced first at her sister, who refused to meet her eye, then at Professor Wilkie, still chained against the wall. Yeah, she knew she was going to die, but she hoped he might walk away from this clusterfuck. He was a kooky son of a bitch, but he’d offered her more than a few reassuring words. Well, he had until one of the Kobocks smashed his face in with a rock. Not enough to kill him, she could see the steady rise and fall of his chest, but enough to silence him for a good long while.

She hated seeing him like that and hated watching her sister even more. Looking the other way was even more depressing, though. A horde of Kobocks hung about on the other side: Picking their noses. Hitting each other with beer bottles. Rutting on the floor like wild dogs. From her vantage, they seemed like a virtual ocean of blue-skinned monstrosities lurking between her and freedom. An ocean of total grossness. Even if Levi came, which seemed less and less likely by the moment, there was no way he could fight through that. A hopeless brawl, even for a thug like Levi.

A thin stream of tears leaked out from the corners of her eyes.

She hadn’t expected the end to be like this. There’d been some awfully low points in her life, points when she’d thought death was calling—like that time she’d overdosed on speed and slept it off in a Walmart bathroom. Or that time one of her ex-boyfriends showed up with a sawed-off shotgun, high on peyote
and
meth, raging about how she’d stolen his liver. Never saw this coming, though.

A shriek of metal and the yowl of Kobos ripped her away from the morbid thoughts.

She turned her head in time to see a giant boulder, big as a park bench, arc through the air and crash into a group of loitering Kobocks, smashing them like a huge flyswatter, leaving only a dark smear on the concrete. Next came movement and more screaming. She couldn’t see much, not with so many creatures blocking the view, but the madcap scrambling and ensuing violence spelled things out plenty clear.

Crazy-ass suicide mission or not, Levi had come for her, and since she hadn’t yet been split open like a pig, some tiny measure of hope remained. A sliver no bigger than her pinky, but persisting all the same. She felt like a death-row inmate—strapped down and waiting for the end—who’d just heard she might get a stay of execution. Maybe.

Another jagged stone flew through the air and crushed more Kobocks.

Then something exploded overhead with the
boom
of a grenade, but, instead of a ball of fire erupting, a cloud of powdery dust rained down into the shifting, screaming mass of blue-skinned assholes below. A handful of the creatures clawed at their eyes, talons digging trenches into their faces, before toppling to the floor, grimy hands clutched to throats as they coughed and hacked. Great gobs of frothy blood burbled out between blackened teeth.

The world was madness and chaos. Anarchy in every sense of the word.

And then the shaman was next to her. He held a wickedly curved knife in one shriveled hand; runes along the blade’s side glowed with a pale-red witchlight. Instead of cutting into her, though, he brought the blade’s edge sliding across the inside of his forearm. With a flick of his wrist, the knife sent a spray of bright blood flying into the air: there was a thunder crack and a blaze of crimson as several black arrows shattered against an iridescent shield.

More chaos. More fighting. More shrieking. None of it made sense.

Then there were pint-sized men, hard-looking Irish brawlers with thick black clubs, running wild amidst the Kobock ranks. Mean little shits, too. They moved like water and wind, dancing and sliding through the crowds in flashes of gold and green, busting the holy shit out of kneecaps and shins. She watched, stunned, as one of the miniature fellas shattered a Kobock leg—a spear of bone popped right through the bastard’s blue skin—then laid into the Kobo’s head over and over again. The disgusting, lopsided shithead rolled into a ball, gangly arms trying to protect its vital bits, but the badass midget was having none of it.

The Irish brawler smashed the Kobock’s head in until gray matter leaked onto the concrete. Then, no shit, the little guy took a smoldering corncob pipe from between his lips and dumped the cherry-red ash onto the blue-skinned corpse. Badass didn’t even begin to cover it.

What the fuck is happening?

Escape was happening, had to be
.

So what if she didn’t know who the pint-sized killers coming to her aid were.
They were coming to her aid
, that was the important thing to remember. Watching them work was a hard sight to stomach, true, but she would live with any number of bad dreams if it meant she got to keep dreaming. She bucked at her bonds, twisting her wrists, jerking her ankles, frantic to get away while her captors were distracted.

More yowls and howls, more flashes of gold and green—it was like being at a fucking Saint Patty’s Day parade in Boston—

A clawed hand landed on her forehead, jerking her head toward the ruby-eyed altar off to the left. The shaman stood over her, free hand no longer holding a knife, but rather a delicate paintbrush coated in a reeky red sludge: the putrid liquid from the cauldron.

“The time is nigh,” he hissed as he set to work, tracing letters and symbols onto her nose, cheeks, and chin with the paintbrush’s tip. The shaman chanted as he worked his way down her body—his words were rough, crude things that hurt her ears. She’d been around the punk scene a long time, but she’d never heard
anything
come close to the ear-splitting sounds that old fuck made. The shaman splashed more script onto her neck and chest and as he did, his words warbled and intensified, building to a crescendo as he scrawled lines and sigils onto her belly.

She screamed, fists balled, stomach taut, legs suddenly rigid. Her insides … she could feel the thing, the homunculus, responding to the shaman’s call, worming its way upward, tunneling through her guts. After a few heartbeats, she could
see
its serpentine form pressing against her stomach, like a baby trying to kick its way out.

The shaman shuffled back a step, his chanting never slowing. Jamie crept forward, her jaw hanging open as she watched the carnage unfolding all around. She looked dazed. Shocked. Confused. But none of that stopped her from raising a knife high overhead—the same knife Ryder had seen in the shaman’s withered hand a minute ago.

“Now!” the shaman shrieked.

“I’m sorry, Sally,” Jamie whispered, lips trembling, tears dripping from her eyes in twin streams. “This is for Mom and Dad and Jackson.” She hesitated, brow furrowing, face hardening. “It’s for us.” Then she plunged the knife down, the blade burrowing into Ryder’s navel.

Ryder’s scream cut off, the force of the blow driving the air from her lungs.

The knife pulled free, and as it left, Ryder could feel the thing inside her forcing its way through the new opening. She gasped, eyes rolling up into her head, back arching—a yogi in
urdhva dhanurasana
, the upward wheel pose. Something wet, sticky, and serpentine slid from her ruptured belly—foot after terrible foot of slick coils pulling loose—before the creature flopped to the floor with a
squish
. After what felt like hours, Ryder collapsed back to the table’s surface, her breaths coming fast and ragged.

Another scream followed. Jamie. Ryder turned her head—the motion made her sputter and cough up a mouthful of hot blood—and bore witness as Jamie slid the same blade into her own belly, jabbing it home while she whimpered and shook.

“Oh shit,” someone whispered in her ear. A man’s voice … though her brain was too clouded by pain to tell her head from her ass.

“Why the hell I gotta get involved in this bullshit,” the voice mumbled.

Chuck. It was Chuck.

She blinked past the tears filling her eyes and searched for the source of the voice. Nothing. But now she could feel fingers working at the cuffs holding her in place. Invisible, he must’ve been invisible. “Don’t worry, sweet-thing, I got you,” he said, voice far too reassuring. She must’ve been in really awful shape for him to use that tone. She felt like a piece of fucking roadkill. “It’s gonna be alright, girl, I got you,” he said again.

“It’s”—she gasped, coughed, metallic blood spurting onto her chin—“too late.”

“Don’t you worry ’bout that. Me and my boy Levi, we got a plan. You just worry about not dying. Cool? Cool.” The cuffs took Chuck only a few seconds to loosen, but no one seemed particularly concerned with her at the moment. The Kobocks were doing their best to fight off the invading army. The shaman was, presumably, tending to the murder god wriggling around on the floor. And Jamie … well, Jamie was curled into the fetal position, clutching at her stomach, trying to hold the blood in.

Chuck, still invisible, hefted Ryder into his arms like a man cradling a small child. “Oh shitty, shit, shit-ass, shit,” he said, body suddenly stiff with tension, fear, or both. “We are so fucked. Like royally fucked, by the King of Fuck-You City.”

Ryder wanted to applaud him for his creative use of the word fuck—the guy certainly had a way with words—but instead she settled for throwing up a stream of blood all down her front.

A second later she saw the source of Chuck’s fear:

The maggoty little grub the shaman had implanted inside her back in the Deep Downs was anything but little now. The wyrm swelled with every passing second, exploding up and out in a sprawl of limbs and spikes and teeth.

The creature stared at Ryder with a hundred glowing ruby eyes all jammed into a reptilian head like a salamander’s, though big as a truck tire, with a gaping mouth, lined top and bottom with inch-long knife-blade teeth. And it kept growing, up and up just like Jack’s beanstalk.

Blood—both hers and her sister’s—rolled across the ground like huge gobs of liquid mercury, before absorbing into the creature’s serpentine tail dragging along the floor. Black horns burst from either side of its head, followed by lanky arms, thick as telephone poles, which sprouted from a too-thin torso. Huge double hinged legs came next, bursting out from its pelvis in a flash of blood-red hide, dead-ending in huge talon-toed feet. Hooked spikes—silver protrusions of bone—stabbed out through shoulders, elbows, and knees, and ran along its spine.

By the time the transformation was complete, the walking nightmare—something vomited straight out of the mouth of hell—loomed over her. Twelve solid feet of muscle, teeth, and claws. And it grew a little larger every second, swelling as Ryder’s blood trickled across the floor and absorbed into its body.

“The world is lay bare before me once more,” the creature said, his voice the guttural buzz of a million flies. The freaky fuck didn’t actually speak in English. The words that came out of his mouth were twisting things that made no sense in her ear; in her head, however, she understood them perfectly. Almost as if her brain was hardwired to comprehend whatever language he spoke. The monster drew in a deep breath, its huge scaled chest expanding as it savored the air. “The taste of freedom.” A serpent’s forked tongue shot out and tickled the air.