The Beast That Was Max (9 page)
"No fucking shit," Lee shouted, making Max wince.
A side window shattered on the Lincoln, and someone crawled into the backseat to break through to the trunk. The same Khmer voice shouted once again from the intersection.
Max threw the manhole cover away, ducked back down when small-arms fire from the headlight car kicked up tar and pinged off metal. The Beast snapped in reply, straining for action. Max grabbed a flash and a concussion grenade from one of the bags, tossed them both at the headlight car, picked two smoke grenades and threw them after the first pair. Explosions shook the ground, and smoke roiled in the night. Concussive shocks sounded through the flesh of his hands stuck over his ears. The roadbed trembled, and a fine rain of debris stung his face as he looked up at the circle of sky above him. Max's legs and arms tingled with restless energy as the Beast gathered itself for more direct participation in the killing.
Max held the Uzi over his head, street level, and fired a burst, replaced the clip, and stood up. The Beast sang. A single high beam still gleamed like a miracle through billowing clouds of smoke. Max emptied a clip, reloaded, and emptied another. The light vanished. Someone gurgled. The Beast sighed with satisfaction. Strings of Khmer, French, and English curses laced the night.
"That was really fucking helpful, Max," Lee screamed. "Now I can't see shit."
Max put his last clip in and waited, flat on the ground on his belly, for a target to separate itself from the dissipating smoke, car, smoldering fires, street corners. "Use your night scope."
"Those assholes around your car ain't showing up clear on it."
Because they were cold. Because they were dead. Because Rithisak's power filled and moved them, and like an electrical or magnetic field, warped their immediate surroundings.
Max passed the back of his hand across his forehead, wiping away sweat, figuratively pushing Mani's memory back into the Beast's hungry jaws.
Doors slammed shut. Rubber tires squealed. A car drove past, and someone laid down a barrage of covering fire into the smoke. Another car started and rumbled off. The ball of desperate time shrank around Max.
Max turned back to the Lincoln. Bodies seethed over the car like a blanket of grubs seeking food. He took out the .45 and the shotgun, left the rest of the equipment and weapons in the bags hanging from the manhole rungs, and charged the car. The Beast ran with him, for him, carrying him to slaughter's feast. Max murdered through the dissipating smoke.
Lee cursed in his ear. From the heavy breathing and shadowy movement on the fire escape, Max thought he might be rappelling down to the street. Between his own and the Beast's excitement, Max tried to clear a corner of his mind to remember Lee, so he would not kill his ally in the throes of a blood rage. Something grabbed his ankle. One of the broken bodies from the center group lay on the ground, peppered by shrapnel and bullet holes, and hung on to him with both hands. A face, pale broken bone sticking through shredded skin, tracked him with sightless eyeholes stuffed with leaves, twigs, wrappers, and can snap tops, like a dying flower seeking out the sun. Max kicked, then went down on one knee and smashed the corpse's arms and hands with the butts of his weapons until pulped bones and flesh slid away from his ankle. Luminescent, viscous white liquid spilled from the dead man's wounds and from the newspaper-filled hole in his chest. Cinnamon scent mingled with the stench of smoke, burnt powder, and sewer-strong filth and decay. The fluid ran like sap from a tree. Tiny seeds and dried, crushed vegetation peppered the substance. For a moment, jungle memories camouflaged the Beast in another time's desperate firefight. Max grunted as he shrugged off another unwanted memory, un-sure if it was his own or Mani's. He stood, sidestepped the other corpse reaching for him, broke into a sprint, and hit the car in a bellowing rage.
Shotgun blasts rocked the layer of figures piled against the hood scrabbling for a way to pry it open. No one turned around to fight him or defend himself or herself against his fire. Max brought the gun to bear against the nearest head, a businessman's neatly styled skull, and pulled the trigger. Flesh and bone sprayed across the others and onto the rear window. The body stump of the man's corpse continued to flail against the Lincoln's reinforced trunk. Max fired again, blasting a hole through the man's back and sending his tie flapping over his shoulder. And again, up his ass. The body cracked and broke apart, twitching limbs sliding to the street in streams of glowing white lava, hands grasping at bumpers and tires and shoes. Using the shotgun and the .45, Max destroyed a police officer, two street adolescents, and a woman with a small shopping bag still hooked through her arm, shattering the dead bodies in a hail of ammunition. He laughed at the human wreckage, and the Beast devoured the carnage.
But before the broken bodies touched the earth, the Beast was howling in frustration. As with Mani, it was trying again to feed on what was not. Already dead, the men and women Max tore apart with his guns did not scream in terror and agony. They did not bleed hot life. Pain, the Beast's sustenance, had already drained away. The Beast's rage slipped and slid over the mortal destruction, claws raking over its own belly, teeth closing on its tail and snapping at illusions and ghosts.
Their hearts were gone; their eyes were blind to their doom.
The wail of sirens grew louder.
Max's weapons clicked, empty. He dropped them, drew the Ruger, but the small-caliber rounds did little damage. Failure whipped his killing frenzy. He pulled and shoved the dead aside, calling on the Beast to give him its spirit claws and fangs. He cursed himself for not bringing a machete or strapping on a Bowie.
Max found himself between the car and Rithisak's servants. Regaining their balance, the dead threw themselves at the car once again, tearing at his duster, clothes, hair, flesh. They pushed him back with their weight, crushed him against the cold Lincoln. The com headset slipped off. Plastic and metal crackled underfoot.
The Beast shook off its disappointment, welcoming the opportunity to rend flesh. Its power flowed in a tidal flood through him, sweeping away nagging little thoughts about Lee and Mani. He punched and kicked until he had space to maneuver, then reached for his closest enemy, a utility repairman still wearing his hard hat. Hands closed around the dead man's head, Max snapped the neck. The repairman clawed at his face, as if it were easier to get to Mani through muscle and bone rather than metal. Max drove his thumbs into the mud-and-glass-fragment-filled eye sockets. The corpse shuddered, its arms losing strength. But Max still fell back against the Lincoln from the weight of his attackers. Others closed in: A woman in a suit and trench coat slammed her backpack repeatedly against his shoulder instead of the car, while another woman, pregnant, worked at his ribs with her bare fists.
A hole in the body's chest, stuffed up with crumpled magazine pages and rags, drew Max's attention. Releasing the skull, Max shifted his attack and tore away the blockage, reached into the chest cavity even as the utility worker tried to bite at Max's face. Max bobbed, ducked, dug deeper, immersing his hand in cool, thick, sticky liquid. Perforated entrails curled around his fingers; organs slithered against his skin. He squeezed his hand into a fist, crushing rotten tissue and muscle. Pulled out vines and strands of soaked newspaper and coat hanger wire. The corpse shuddered. A gasp of poisoned air escaped the dead man's parted, blackened lips, filling Max's mouth and nose with a cloud's kiss of decomposing flesh and fermenting shit. Max shook the dead thing by its chest hole. Bone cracked. Skin tore. Its head lolled back and forth, its hands fell away from Max's face, and it lay limp in his grip. Max threw the body to the side, knocking back the businesswoman with the knapsack.
Two more dead men, a police officer and a young man in a sweat suit, both shot through the forehead, bore down on Max, pinning his arms against his chest. He kicked and kneed them, breaking bones and joints, but not getting to the vital essence Rithisak had planted inside them. He lunged forward, bit the nose from the policeman. The sour taste of dead flesh curled around his tongue. He drew the creature closer until he could use his teeth and tongue on its eyes. The packed matter broke apart in his mouth, filling his throat with bitter herbs, tangy earth, oily chemicals. Max freed one of his arms as the dead man jerked back, then shoved his fingers into its eye sockets. Holding on to the skull, he forced the cop into the youth, knocking them both down and freeing his other arm. The pregnant woman stepped forward, along with a gray-haired woman and a broad, big-bellied man.
Max went down on one knee and let the corpses get to the Lincoln over him while he finished the policeman, then the youth, his fingers beginning to ache with the effort of dragging out the odd mixtures of substances and materials from body cavities. The corpses collapsed into their natural state under his ministrations. The Beast cried out in triumph. While not as satisfying as murdering the living, the work had its pleasures. The Beast understood ruined meat and gore-stained hands. The suffering was missing, but the result was the same: What moved stopped. Taking what it could from bodies, the Beast rose to the task of butchering the dead.
Max moved without thought, riding the swelling wave of the Beast's urgency, which eclipsed all other shadows and desires inside him. Deep in the heart of devastation, the circuit joining the Beast and Max closed. The Beast's appetite was his action, as it was in his best moments. The Beast's power and joy and cruelty were his, and Max savored the intoxicating rush of life he felt in death's embrace.
The big man's belly knocked Max back into the Lincoln's bumper. Max bounced off metal, swung out of the way of the dead man's relentless approach, pushed back and tripped several of the walking corpses approaching the car. The gray-haired woman, hanging on to Belly Man's shirt, stepped into Max's crotch with an oversize orthotic shoe as she attacked the trunk. Max trapped a leg with hands wrapped around its ankle, then shoved his shoulder into the shin. Gray Hair fell backward, arms reaching for the car, and landed with a crunch. As she tried to get up, a teenager in baggy clothes stepped onto its chest, the heel of a reflective-surface sneaker sinking into the hole through which the dead woman's heart had been taken. Gray Hair's head snapped back, cracked against the street. Rice sprayed up in miniature geysers from her eye sockets.
Max drove his shoulder into Belly Man's groin, nearly lifting him off the ground. Delicate structures snapped and burst within the bubble of the dead man's body, but his mass and Max's broken balance forced them both onto the back of the car. The weight of Belly Man's body, along with the corpses behind him, again pinned Max against the trunk. This time his arms were at his sides, and the press of bodies and Belly Man's arms held him in check. The pregnant woman flailed against the hood on one side of him; the business-suited woman smashed her knapsack against metal as if it were a sledgehammer.
Max stretched forward and closed his teeth over Belly Man's throat, ripping flesh and working the trachea loose as he worked his hands down into Belly Man's pants. Fingers curled into claws. Wound-ruptured skin oozing cold organic sludge parted under his pressure. He forced his way into the corpse's body, ripping through scrotum and belly, curling up into the enormous stomach where he pulled back from burning acid and worked through jellylike fat and decomposing organs, under ribs and spine, until the stretched rents he had made in the skin tore and the reservoir of the dead man's insides gushed out with a wet gurgle, as if a drain had been opened in a backed-up toilet. Belly Man collapsed in Max's arms, reeking of a lifetime's bad habits. Max released its throat, reached into the heart's cavity, and pulled out the magical detritus Rithisak had planted to replace the life-giving muscle. The dead man slid against Max, lighter for the release of inner organs. Before the dead thing fell to the ground, Max poked out its bottle-cap eyes.
Baggy Teenager appeared before him, Gray Hair hanging on to his leg. Max lashed out with kicks, breaking hips and knees and spine. The teenager fell on top of Gray Hair in a twitching heap, and Max did not bother severing their ties with Rithisak, turning instead to the women by his sides.
He intercepted Suit Woman's knapsack as it followed a lazy arc to the car, redirected the bag's momentum, and sent it smashing into several of the dead behind her. The woman hung on to the knapsack as if it were her only connection to what she had once been. She spun with the change of arc and crashed into a wall of the walking dead.
Max whirled around and punched Baby Woman in the jaw, trying to draw her attention. He went for her eyes first, but her fingers closed over his face and mirrored his attack, digging at his own eyes. He broke her hold, kicked back a pair of closing corpses, stuck a hand in the slit across her throat that had killed her. He rammed his hand up into her skull and poked out the dog shit and tiny plastic drug vials replacing her eyes. He poked his other hand through the same, stinking mire in her chest hole and reached for Rithisak's magic in her viscera. Baby Woman drooped.
Another set of hands shot out from the torn fabric over her belly. Tiny fingers fastened on to his belt. Baby Woman threw herself into a final, frantic seizure as her infant fought its way out of her womb, as heartless and blind to the world as its mother. As Max fended off the woman's final spasmodic assault, the baby emerged from the widening rent that split her from between her legs to her chest. White, luminescent fluid spilled from the rent. An umbilical cord danced in the air. The baby closed in on Max, shooting for his genitals, striking and lashing at his manhood with pudgy arms and legs. Max took the infant by the skull, scooped the shit and vials from its eyes and chest, and threw the dead husk away.