Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (21 page)

“Hold on,” I said. “Not so loud. What man?”

“A man I saw before. Black Sun, the one with yellow hair. He was in the back of the apartment, I mean downstairs. I saw him from the window!” She looked far more worried than I would have expected from a woman who could probably turn most grown men into hamburger in any fair fight.

“Shit.” I was angry with myself, so worked up about Anaita that I had all but forgotten my neo-Nazi friends. I'd made it clear I wasn't going to help them, and had probably fucked up their local operation pretty good by calling the police, but even if they just wanted to punish me for that, why were they hanging around an apartment I hadn't visited for a long time? “We shouldn't have come here, damn it. What did you have to get that was so important?”

She held up a rumpled brown paper bag, folded into a package the size of a hardcover book. “Letters from my sister.” She looked sad but defiant. “I could not leave these. She is the only one from my home I still care about!”

“Yeah. Well.” I didn't really know what to say. I was angrier with myself than with her. “Just hop in and let's get out of here.”

As we pulled out, I saw something skitter along the sidewalk near the car and disappear into the bushes. It might have been a squirrel or a cat, but I was pretty sure it wasn't either of those things. I cursed, but I decided not to tell Halyna. Instead, I concentrated on making sure we weren't followed.

It was getting dark and the commute was in full flow, so it took about twenty minutes to escape downtown Jude. I wasn't going near the freeway at that time of day, so I took the bumper-to-bumper route along the Woodside Expressway until I could turn onto Middlefield. South of the expressway there's a long belt of industrial buildings before you reach the edges of the Atherton district, and I thought we'd be able to get home faster that way. In most circumstances, I'd have been right.

The sky to the west had been red when we were on the expressway, but the sun had just dropped behind the hills, and in front of us the horizon had cooled to such a dark blue it was nearly black. The streetlights were on, but the sidewalks and buildings seemed largely deserted.

“It is too dark,” Halyna said abruptly.

“This part of town shuts down after five,” I said, but the Amazon had twisted in her seat and was staring into the back of the car.

“Bobby,” she said, “something is on the window.”

I slowed down and looked over my shoulder to see what she was talking about. It took a moment before I realized that the back passenger window on her side had gone black. Totally black, although I could see lights all around us through the other windows.

The wheel of the car bumped up a curb, and I had to look at where I was going, just in time to avoid ramming a soap-scribbled showroom window. I got back onto the road, narrowly avoiding a fire hydrant.

“Something is coming through the window,” she said, her voice shaky. “Like black snakes . . . !”

I looked back in time to see something squeezing through the top of the window, something dark and faintly shiny that had made itself almost as flat as paper to slide through the crack between window and doorframe. An instant later, the questing tendrils became a streaming, rubbery sheet, ribboning into the back seat like someone was pumping in liquid latex.

A tentacle of the dark, rubbery stuff whipped out and grabbed my neck. Another flopped over my eyes. Halyna screamed in surprise and kept screaming. I probably would have too, except the blob around my neck was now blocking my mouth as well. Whatever had crawled into the car seemed to have no shape, no bones or limbs, but I felt something sharp biting at my arm. And I couldn't see. Did I mention that? Not good when you're driving.

Still mostly blinded by the thing wrapped around my head, I jerked the wheel to the right and jammed my foot down against the accelerator. The Datsun leaped ahead and hit the curb again, this time so hard that I could hear the tire blow out. Then something like a giant fist rocked the entire car. The Datsun was way too old to have airbags, but the jelly-like substance that was currently smothering me kept me from going through the windshield.

The collision with whatever we'd hit had stunned the rubbery thing just enough for me to get my arm up and yank the slippery tendril loose from my eyes. The windshield was spiderwebbed with cracks but still intact. We had smashed into the side of a building; chunks of plaster and brick were piled on the ruined hood. Halyna was still screaming, but she was also struggling with the strands that had grabbed her.

I still didn't have the slightest idea what we were fighting. It was ridiculously slick, shapeless, and definitely stronger than a human—that is, if it was just one thing. I grabbed at the tentacle or pseudopod or whatever the long, sticky thing was that had snared Halyna, and pulled hard, trying to get her free. Meanwhile, the thing began exerting itself to drag me into the back seat, where the dark, shapeless bulk of it still lay.

I was almost standing on the driver's seat now: it felt like fighting a giant octopus, something immensely strong and slick, but with no actual shape I could make out. Luckily, my struggle distracted its attention enough that Halyna finally got the passenger door open and fell out onto the pavement. After a moment, she kicked her legs free and rolled a couple of yards away.

“Run!” I yelled just before the thing slapped another slithery arm over my face, but I didn't have time to see whether Halyna had escaped because now something was also trying to eat its way into my chest. Using my legs as well as my arms, I finally managed to wrench the pseudopod loose from my face.

By this point I was nearly upside down in the driver's seat. My unwanted passenger started to flow over me, and that didn't seem like a good or healthy thing. I yanked a hand free, reached down to the floor, and grabbed the first item I could find, the bag of phones, then used it to bash the nearest rubbery arm as hard as I could. It knocked the blob-creature back a little, but didn't discourage it much. The problem was that I was stuck half under the steering wheel, with no room to maneuver. I pushed myself around and toward the passenger seat until I could finally draw my gun. I fired straight into the thing, silver slugs, four or five as fast as I could pull the trigger. The noise was ear-splitting in the enclosed space but the shots did absolutely fuck-all, making several holes in the jelly-beast that quickly closed right up again, and some in the roof of my Datsun that didn't.

I knew I had to get out of the car or I was dead. I didn't know what this boneless monstrosity would do to me—the word “absorbed” flitted briefly through my imagination—but I knew it wouldn't be good, so I dropped the gun and reached into the glove compartment, hoping to find something sharp to cut myself out of its grip. I was lying across both seats, gear shift poking my back and open passenger door only a foot away from my head, but the thing had wrapped itself around my legs, hugging like a python, while the rest of it tried to ooze over the seat and smother me, like two hundred pounds of lust-crazed gelatin.

I couldn't find anything useful in the glove compartment, and every second of fighting one-handed brought me closer to destruction. Maps, a garage-door opener, all kinds of crap came tumbling out, me trying to figure out what they were by distracted touch. Pens, a road flare—a road flare! I tried to pull it toward me, wondering if fire might succeed where bullets failed, but the blob slapped at my head and arm with one of those flapping jelly tentacles and the flare flew out the open passenger door.

Now it was most of the way over the seat, its flabby bulk pressed against the dome light cover, and the only thing holding it away was my kicking legs. I reached out and found the bag of cell phones again. I started to beat the creature as hard as I could with it, over and over, but it was like punching the world's biggest, nastiest gummy bear. Then it finally got between the driver's seat and the ceiling and poured slowly down on top of me, the weight pushing my knees back against my chest. Then I saw the great, blunt knob of the nearest jelly arm begin to change.

It
hardened
, at least that's how it looked—like ice forming on a windshield. The dark, rubbery material turned paler, almost white, then split. The pale bits were getting longer, sharper, a Moray eel's mouthful of ragged fangs.
I'm so fucked
, was all I could think. Because this thing was growing teeth on the end of its arm.

I had just a half a second or so to prepare for getting my face bitten off, when something incredibly bright white and red shoved in from the passenger door. The limb with the new teeth jerked away from the glare, pseudo-mouth gaping. It even hissed. I think it did, anyway, though it might have been the flare that Halyna was holding.

The jelly monster retreated halfway into the back seat as the flare came near, flattening itself into a shape somewhere between a sunflower and a buzzsaw. I scrambled toward the passenger door. My automatic was lost somewhere under the seat, but I grabbed the bag of phones before I tumbled out onto the sidewalk, then kicked the door shut behind me.

We had crashed the car into the side of a big white building that said “Carquinez Auto Repair” in block letters along the top, but I didn't think a mechanic was going to do us any good. The thing in the car was going crazy, thumping the windows until they were all cracked, making the small vehicle shake like a pudding in an earthquake. Halyna did her best to help me up. Her face was covered with bloody scratches. I grabbed the flare out of her hand.

Crash!
A big, purple-black arm knocked a hole in the back seat window. The thing was already starting to ooze out the opening when I tugged open the gas tank cover. Thank God this car was old enough that the cover didn't lock. I shoved the flare in, grabbed Halyna by the arm, and ran.

A white-yellow jet of flame jumped out of the gas tank, then a second later an immense
whump
of an explosion knocked us staggering. Pieces of metal and plastic began to rain down around us. When I turned, the Datsun was engulfed in flames, the new black paint bubbling, so that, for a moment, I could see bits of the old green paint beneath, then a second later those bits turned black too. Inside the car, the jelly monster thrashed in the flames for long moments before sinking down out of sight. I had a second or two to breathe, then a dark arm, flat as a ribbon, pushed its way out through the tiny space between door and doorframe, like something shat out of the Devil's own Play-Doh Fun Factory.

Whoompf!
Another explosion sent flames even higher, and the flattened, reaching arm straightened and then began to shrivel. A bit of the end dropped off and fell on the pavement where it lay, twitching. People were running toward us now from several directions, so I hurried forward and held the flare against the fallen piece of awfulness until it turned to greasy char.

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! My car!”

“Your car
is
fuck,” said Halyna sadly. She wiped a sweaty ringlet of red hair out of her eyes. Her face was ghost-pale. “Totally fuck. Now how do we get home?”

I could hear sirens in the distance, coming closer. The pyre of ashy black smoke had risen far above the building, and the flames reached almost as high. People could probably see my burning ride from every tall building in downtown Jude.

B
Y THE
time I'd finished dealing with the police and we got a cab home (or at least close enough to walk home, since cab companies keep records of where they drop you off) I was in about as shitty a mood as you'd expect. It wasn't the loss of my car so much—well, yes, it was, because cars are expensive, and I was going to run out of money at this rate long before I'd planned—as the feeling that I'd dropped the ball.

While Oxana rushed off to find first aid for Halyna's scrapes and cuts and bruises, I sat down and examined my own injuries in good light for the first time. Nothing too severe, but a number of weird bite-shaped traumas on my arms and legs.

“Okay,” I said. “Can anybody tell me what that was?”

Halyna and I had tried to discuss it while the police were there, but all she'd been able to whisper to me was that it was a “bug,” which made no sense, unless they were raising bugs in nuclear reactors these days.

“Black Sun gets them,” said Oxana on her way past with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Bird bug.”

“There is no such thing as a bird bug.”

“Not bird.
Bear
bug.” Halyna separated herself from Oxana's ministrations. “That is the name. I have heard it. Bear bug.”

I stared at her for a long moment, then it clicked. “Bugbear. Not bear bug—bugbear. I've heard of those, too. But they're not easy to summon.”

“Black Sun is very bad,” Halyna said. “We telled you. Told you. They have things like this they can call.”

I groaned. “Great. So not only do I have an angry goddess after me, the Black Sun Faction is now trying to kill me with vicious pudding monsters.” But it did seem strange. I'd never seen one of the four-limbed Nightmare Children before or even heard of them, but I knew a little about bugbears, and they were no small potatoes in the Monsters of Ancient Darkness category. How could a bunch of idiots like Baldur von Ridiculous and his merry band of racists call on something like that? And if they thought I had Eligor's horn stashed somewhere, or just knew how to find it, why were they sending monsters to kill me instead of just following me?

I set my gun down, then opened the bag of cellphones, which rattled ominously. But when I set them out on the table I discovered to my immense joy that nothing worse had happened than the backs had popped off a couple of them. My coat, though, smelled like burnt oil and burnt bugbear (which was much worse). I wanted that stench gone, which meant I'd have to hang it in the garage until I could get it to the dry cleaners, so I started emptying the pockets. As I did, my fingers found something in the bottom of one of them.

“Well, shit,” I said, holding it up. “No wonder.”

The Amazons crowded in. “Is flash drive,” said Oxana.

“What's more relevant is that this thumb drive came out of the Black Sun guy's laptop,” I said. “I grabbed it when I was bailing out the other day. What with all the other stuff, I just forgot. I wonder what's on it that made them send a bugbear after me? I must have really pissed them off. And where did they find the power or the skill to manage something like that in the first place?”

I stuck it into Caz's computer, but the thing was encrypted up the yin-yang. We tried a bunch of predictable passwords, things like “Sonnenrad,” “Aryan,” “Fatherland,” but without luck. It occurred to me they might not be as stupid as people in the movies and the password might be “4Dkah2%9ja3mv5” or something. I opened myself a beer and thought about it for a moment, then went outside and walked until I had some bars on my phone.

“Clarence,” I said when he picked up. “I need you again. I've got a thumb drive from that bunch of neo-Nazis I keep having problems with. It's related to the other thing. I need someone to get into it, but it's got all this encryption shit I can't deal with.”

He was silent for a long moment. “First of all, Bobby, I want you to start calling me ‘Harrison.' It's my Earth name and, as I keep telling you, I don't like being called Clarence.”

“Okay, okay. Blackmailer. I'm sorry,
Harrison
, but I need your help. Can you come over?”

I could hear how pleased he was, and it made me want to put a wastebasket over his head and bang on it until he was less happy. “Thank you, Bobby. Now, as far as your thumb drive goes, I'm not really very good with that stuff.”

“Oh, shit, come on! You found that address ten times faster than I could have!”

“That's different. That was just a records search. You want someone to break encryption.” He paused. “You know, that's actually something Wendell used to do.”

“Wendell? As in your boyfriend?”

“He's not really my boyfriend, Bobby. We're seeing each other, but we're not ready to make that kind of—”

“Don't. Just . . . don't. Tell me this—how did you meet him? Did he come up to you in a low tavern of some kind and say, ‘Hey, you're really cute. I hear you work with Bobby Dollar—let's hang out, you and me.' Or anything similar?”

“No.” He was insulted. “If you have to know, I met him at a club, but
I
went up to
him
and asked him to dance.”

“If your relationship survived the dance floor, he's either desperate or blind. Does he take a dog with you everywhere you go, even into restaurants?”

“You're not funny, Bobby. And you're the one who wants the favor, remember?”

I was getting desperate. Things were mounting up fast, and the number of questions still far outweighed the answers, especially adding the Black Sun Faction back into the problem. And on top of everything else, I no longer had a car. “Okay. I'll give him a chance, but don't bring him here. There's a coffee shop on University Avenue, just on the Palo Alto side of the freeway. Can you find it? Bring Wendell, and we'll talk. I have to walk, so make it twenty minutes, minimum.”

“Why are you walking?”

“Why are you talking? Twenty minutes. Wear a white carnation. The code phrase is:
Gay Mafia Strong-arms Angel in Need
.” I hung up before he could gloat.

 • • • 

Despite having to limp there on foot, I beat the pair by a few minutes, which gave me time to down the first cup of coffee I would need to make it through the evening. I don't know how you'd feel, but having a very powerful angel laugh knowingly at me in the morning, then a squishy gelatinous mass with teeth try to kill me in the afternoon made for a wearying combination. What I really wanted to do was take a nap, because I was beginning to think that sleep might be a scarce commodity in the days ahead.

What can I say? The Highest knew what He was doing when He invented caffeine. Seriously, hats off to the Big Guy.

Wendell was just as fair-haired and handsome in person as he had been from my apartment window, with a mustache so neatly trimmed it almost didn't look real. Even more depressing, he was a nice guy. Which didn't prove he was trustworthy, of course. We shook hands. His grip was pretty impressive.

“I've heard a lot about you, Bobby,” he said.

“I have alibis for everything except the misdemeanors. I don't worry about those.”

He laughed, which just pissed me off. I hate it when people I don't want to like think I'm funny. I'm pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I'll purr at you, but I'll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you'd ignored me.

“No, really,” he said. “And not just from Harrison.”

I must have looked skeptical, because Clarence broke in. “Wendell used to be in Counterstrike!”

Now skepticism became something a little deeper. “You're joking.”

“CU
Nephelai
,” Wendell said. “The Clouds. You were
Lyrae
. People still talk about you.”

The Clouds were one of the support groups for the frontline Counterstrike units like mine. We often took one of them with us to run special commo or mess with various kinds of machines. Somebody like that would be a goldmine for the kinds of things I might have to do in the days ahead—which meant it all seemed a little too perfect. Or was that just my paranoia engine running hot? Two different kinds of near-death experiences in one day can do that to a guy.

I quizzed him a bit, but everything Wendell said made sense. He knew the right people, the right things, even remembered the busted soda machine at Camp Zion that people called Saint Peter because it turned you away just when you thought you'd reached the Promised Land. That didn't prove anything, of course. If I needed to, I could put together a spurious background in a day that would convince you I was a Secret Service agent or a children's television host. Besides, I wasn't worried that he'd been working in a CU; I was worried that he might still be working for our bosses, and I might be his current assignment.

“I don't know if Clar . . . Harrison has explained to you, but simply hanging out with me is probably a capital offense these days. And what I'd be asking you to do is a lot worse than that. I don't like other people getting in trouble because of my problems.”

Wendell gave me that sensible, clear-eyed look I was already beginning to resent. “Harrison told me a lot. Enough to know that I think you're trying to do the right thing.”

I shook my head. “Easy to say now. Harder to say when our bosses toss you in the dumbwaiter and drop you into the burning basement for keeps. This is serious shit I'm in, and none of it is fun. Why should I trust a novice?” Why should I trust
anyone
was the real question, but I didn't have much choice, I simply couldn't do this without allies.

Wendell nodded. “I first figured out I was gay when I was at Zion,” he said. He looked at Clarence and smiled. “I kind of freaked out. I went to my loke . . . I mean my NCO.”

I almost smiled myself. “Don't worry. I know what a CU loke is.”

“Right. Of course. Anyway, I went to see him, and I told him. I was fresh out of Heaven and I figured something had gone wrong with me. I didn't know if I had been given a homosexual body or I'd messed up the new body with a homosexual soul, but obviously I wasn't doing things right. He said, and I'm pretty much quoting him, ‘Son, soldiers have been humping soldiers a long, long time. Hell, those ancient Greeks went into battle without any pants on, ring-a-dings swingin' in the breeze! And any army grunt will tell you that most navies are as queer as dinner theater. Now me, I don't care if you like ladies or gentlemen. Just remember, No means No. Be respectful of your fellow soldiers, because you all have to protect each other out there, and that means you gotta trust each other.' That's all he said.”

“Nice story,” I said after a moment. “But I'm not sure . . .”

“Hang on. Three months later, our loke refused to participate in an operation because there were hostages. Children. A demon had got into a guy, and he'd gone into a preschool with a machete and was threatening to start throwing bodies out. Raguel—that was my NCO—said let the regular mortal police handle it, because right now it was just ordinary crazy, but if we stepped in it might escalate into a Heaven-Hell thing. He thought the kids had a better chance if we let the cops handle it.”

“But you know the rules,” I said, as seriously as if I agreed with all of them myself. “You can't choose which orders from Upstairs to obey. Our job is to protect souls, and as far as Heaven's concerned, that was the important part. You don't let a demon go once it's broken cover on Earth.”

“Yeah, but I've been an advocate too, just like you, Bobby. I deal with souls, including a lot more children than I like. None of us wanted any dead kids, no matter how much confetti they were going to throw at them when they showed up in Heaven. But my loke got cashiered for that. I never saw him again. When I found out, I decided that what Heaven wanted wasn't always right, and I've never seen anything since that convinced me otherwise. Scared the shit out of me at the time, but I don't get surprised much anymore.”

Clarence reached over and squeezed his hand.

I honestly didn't know what to do, whether to trust this guy or not. If Sam had answered the two or three messages I'd left him in an attempt to reconnect, I could have asked his opinion. Sam's advice is almost always good—not that I follow it most of the time, but it's nice to know why I'm about to fuck up. Without him, I was on my own. Of course, I wasn't completely sure of Sam, either. Did it really even matter whether Wendell was on the up and up? If our bosses wanted to bust me, they already had enough evidence to bag me, wrap me, and send me straight to Hades. And if Wendell was working for Anaita, instead—well, that was different, but it might still be better to have him on the inside where I could keep an eye on him. This was assuming that if he was crooked, Clarence didn't know. But maybe Clarence was in on it, too.