The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two (14 page)

“Your idea,
we
just was gonna fuck.”
Dave found the energy to sit up now. “You wanted us to film it
while the three of
us
fucked you blue.” He elbowed Sam and
they laughed.

The other man grinned. “And we said, what the
fuck. Let’s give the bitch what she wants.” He laughed. “Turned
out, you fucked us blue!”

“You can’t.” Realization paralyzed her.
No. No. No
. Snapping out of it, she searched the pile of
clothes for her stockings and shoes. “You’ve got to give the film
to me.”

“Can’t.” Dave paled. “Raul took his camera
home with him.”

“No.” A fresh wave of nausea rose and she
vomited again. The men laughed. “You can’t do this.”

“Sick up in the can, baby,” Sam said. “You’re
getting that all over!”

The drugs and alcohol were still distorting
Cawood’s senses, still shielding her from the full realization of
events.
No big deal. Not as bad as it looks
! She fumbled
into her shoes and pushed her hair from her eyes.
I can handle
this
. Her mind spun away from the scene.

“You one hungry pussy, baby,” Dave said, a
carnal wave washed over his features. He fished his penis out of
his boxers. “What about me and Sammie do you one more time. They
say it cures a hangover.”

Choking back bile, Cawood turned from them
and hurried shakily down the hallway away from them. Their catcalls
chased her. Her numb fingers barely worked the lock on the door.
Then she was in a hall outside, careening, spinning into doorjambs
and walls. She could think of nothing. Her legs were wet now as
liquids spilled from her body. The thought doubled her over with
dry heaves.

She had to get home, had to get to her
apartment before her neighbors woke up. Terrified, she lurched down
two flights of stairs and was in the street. Cawood didn’t
recognize the neighborhood. Casting around, she didn’t know the
Level. It was deep though. A dead man staggered along the sidewalk
toward her and passed. His round eyes were wide with interest or
terror.

The dead on the street
. At most Level
Two
if she was lucky. She had no watch, no idea of the time.
Headlights cut along the road. The nun waved at the cab. It slowed.
She dove into the back seat without looking at the driver. She kept
her face shielded with her hand. Voice, harsh and bitter she grated
out her address. As the taxi sped from the curb, Cawood sank into
her terrified thoughts.

19 – Sunken City

The Sunken City was a perfect place for
Demons to make their terrestrial lair. Their Infernal residence was
the Pit, but traveling to and from the nether regions required
considerable energy. By setting up shop in the Sunken City they
could make better use of their powers while easily deciding who
would come and go.

After the hit on Stahn, Felon had returned to
his hotel where he received word that Baron Balg would make final
payment aboard his yacht the following morning. The minor change in
plan raised internal alarms, but the assassin always expected a
double cross. If Balg did anything stupid Felon would make it more
expensive than a bit of gold. That was why betrayal was so
unlikely. Demons enjoyed nice long lives in the world after the
Change, and it was only money. Meeting in the Sunken City was yet a
quirk of the Demon’s massive ego.

The Coastview desk clerk told him to join Mr.
Wurn at pier 22 no later than 9 a.m. Felon took a cab to the harbor
and found the pier among the battered hulks of freighters.

He watched
Mr.
Wurn where he worked
the trawler’s controls. Balg’s servant looked like something that
belonged under a bridge. He had lurched out of the morning fog and
motioned for the assassin to follow. The troll’s features were
human, but distorted and grossly over-sized. His nose was easily a
foot in length, which stood out, because Wurn was three and a half
feet tall. He had thick, powerful arms that he had to keep bent
while walking or let his knuckles drag. Something supernatural had
made him. Wurn had obvious native strength, but the simple
activities of life were a chore for him. His breath came in ragged
gasps, and sweat poured from him continuously. His eyes were tiny
and red, though they held quick, if tormented, intelligence. Wurn
wore greasy coveralls, and smelled like vomit.

He had led Felon to an old fishing trawler,
and quickly set course for the Sunken City. Some twenty minutes
into the journey, Felon moved to the bow to stay clear of the
troll’s stench. It was a struggle to keep a cigarette lit in the
damp, misty air.

They followed an indirect route away from the
ancient bridges—collapsed and eroded now. There was too much
wreckage around the crumbled buttresses to be safely navigated.
Looking at the destruction, Felon remembered the fires and riots in
the early Change.

Felon didn’t waste words on Wurn. He knew
that Demons had control over their own body shapes, and could
change them with little effort. And he knew that they, like Angels,
could manipulate matter to create whatever they needed from raw
materials around them. Looking at the troll, it seemed they could
work their magic on living flesh as well. It amazed him that Wurn
was sent to get him. The Demons were growing powerful, or foolhardy
to allow something like the troll so close to people. Wurn was no
genetic screw up. Felon had always suspected that down deep Demons
feared humans and their position in the Divine hierarchy. But Wurn
was an open challenge. The Demons thumbed their noses at humanity,
Fallen and the Angels. They were putting the City of Light on
notice.

“Master Balg expects you.” Wurn’s guttural
syllables flopped across the deck like fish. He had left the small
wheelhouse and approached. His lips were the size of cucumbers,
swollen beyond useful communication.

Felon glared.

“Master Balg says you are a great man!” Wurn
smiled revealing large broken teeth.

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Felon snarled and
drew on his cigarette.

Wurn scratched the thin fur on his sparsely
covered head, and returned to the wheelhouse. The troll’s face
appeared in the small window, weighing the assassin with nervous
glances. He mumbled worriedly to himself.

Felon wondered why the Demon wasted flattery
on a hired gun. Balg had neither the need nor the inclination.
Demons rarely threw compliments around, and if they did, it was
always for a reason. Why? Was it sugar coating to coax him into
recklessness? Was it an attempt to flatter him into thinking he was
something he was not? Was Balg trying to lull him into a false
sense of security or were the words delivered to buy the assassin’s
favor? Did it suggest that Balg was afraid? He had just proven yet
again that he could kill Demons—that he possessed the ability to
surprise members of the Infernal host.

Or, was that question proof of his first
proposition at work? Felon knew that he should never underestimate
a Demon, and here he was actually thinking that a one might fear
him. Perhaps that was why Wurn had been instructed to flatter
him—if there
was
a reason. Already, Felon’s thoughts had
turned inward, decreasing his reaction time a degree. The assassin
knew that it only took a second to die. The compliment had already
cost him a minute.

He shook his damp locks, pulled the collar of
his overcoat tight about his neck and fumbled with a cigarette.
Minutes later the troll drove the boat into a suffocating fog bank.
The chill air ate into Felon’s bones. His fingers fumbled and his
nose ran freely. He sucked a stream of acrid smoke into his
nostrils hoping it would dry and warm the sinus cavity. The
assassin allowed himself a scarf, and warm socks, but no gloves.
Felon almost died once because of gloves. They kept his fingers
warm but a gun has a definite shape, and required precision to
fire. He could not feel a trigger properly through gloves, and
fabric reacted differently to other materials. Damp leather could
catch on a wool coat or cotton jacket. Human skin, damp or cold,
could distinguish the outline of a gun a lot better than a layer of
fabric.

The Sunken City loomed suddenly out of a
rolling fog. Monoliths of salt-stained brick and stone appeared.
The ocean ground slowly, noisily through cramped streets, pounding
its outer neighborhoods with waves. The walls of the narrow canyons
were enormous sheets of concrete and steel rising in the distance.
The dead and abandoned buildings reared out of the water at
disturbing angles, many ready to collapse. Those closest to the
boat disappeared in the low cloud cover. The fog swirled and
churned around the trawler, as they pitched over broken houses
while hollow thunder boomed, sending adrenaline surging in his
veins. A gust of wind and the fogbank parted—the boat slipped into
the protection of a narrow city street that opened along a steep
divide. Echoes of water and wind rumbled. The Sunken City’s voice
had nothing good to say.

Wurn slowed the trawler to a crawl. The water
around them was black. Felon knew that the outer rim of buildings
was a formidable barrier to any approaching ships. Tons of twisted
steel and shattered rubble made a reef of destruction that few
could navigate. Wurn steered down the flooded street, toward the
inner neighborhoods where Felon knew lights were kept burning with
coal and gas. That was where the Demon’s lived.

There was a splash to his left.
Swimmers
! A number of them converged on Wurn’s trawler when
it slowed to navigate the dark streets. They swam silently with the
boat, occasionally tilting a gray eye at its occupants. Swimmers
were preserved by the Change and the high concentrations of salt in
the water. The Demons allowed them to populate the streets as a
deterrent to visitors. Little was known about them. Since their
bodies could not long withstand the rigors of life out of the
water, they posed little threat. Nobody who swam with the Swimmers
lived to tell the tale.

“Hey there’s Swimmers!” Wurn exclaimed
redundantly with dismay in his features. “Stay out of the
water!”

Swimmers were dead people—drowned, murdered
or dumped. The Change preserved them with the extinction of most
forms of bacteria. Small fish nibbled the swimming corpses, large
fish took the odd bite, but those that remained intact toughened in
the salt water, their skins taking on a gray, sharkskin look. The
dead on land had to worry about dehydration; the dead in the sea
had to worry about dissolving. If the skin was intact, a Swimmer
could go on, growing more durable with each passing year. But, if
the skin was broken, that was the beginning of the end. Little fish
and the nibbling parasites got in. In time, the afflicted Swimmer
would become more and more ragged, more bloated and distended. In
late stages they resembled a tangle of floating bones and rotting
meat.

The creatures traveled the sunken streets
alone or in packs. Swimmers didn’t speak. They were cunning, but
unlike the dead on land they behaved like animals—more apt to flee
than fight. Felon didn’t care what they were, or what they thought,
he only knew that they didn’t like bullets. In the dark water their
long-limbed bodies resembled toads’.

Felon growled, touching his holster as he
eyed the boatman. The trawler picked up speed.

The broad sunken avenues gaped to either side
of them as they passed over drowned intersections. At places where
traffic of ocean currents converged, small maelstroms were created,
their impetus pulling at the boat. The powerful engine rumbled and
sent them surging on. One hundred years of rain and pounding surf
had worn away at the Sunken City’s skyline. Skyscrapers had tumbled
and apartment blocks had collapsed into dangerous mazes of corroded
steel and mountains of reinforced concrete. The structures at the
eastern edge of the Sunken City took the worst of it; they were
pounded by Old Atlantic and torn by its winds. What remained had
formed a break wall—a complicated shallows that absorbed the energy
of the waves, protected the buildings deeper in.

Millions had once lived in the now shattered
buildings, driven its flooded streets, and worked in its crumbled
factories and for a moment a nagging pre-Change recollection tugged
at Felon’s thoughts. He imagined most were dead now and wondered
how many of them still moved along its streets as Swimmers.

A horrible cry cut through the gathering
gloom. It started guttural and gravely high above them, and wound
upward in pitch and ferocity, until it became a screaming whip
stroke of sound that undulated and fell on the delicate tissues of
the brain like broken glass. Felon’s gun was out and pointed at the
shadows above.

“Watcher!” he hissed.

“Watchers watch!” the troll whimpered,
glancing into the shadows above them before gesturing with an
over-sized hand. “There! Master Balg’s boat—on the Street of
Walls!” He swung his arms along a broad corridor lined with
enormous stone buildings.

The overcast left everything in gloom. Felon
ripped his eyes away from the empty window frames above. He could
see the shape of a large ship a half-mile away. Lights blazed out
of its many windows and with it came haunting musical strains. The
sounds echoed toward them, distorted by the distance.

“Light!” He paced to the wheelhouse.

Wurn reached under the boat’s dashboard and
grabbed a spotlight. Felon snatched it away and played its harsh
beam first along the regular surfaces of the buildings towering
over them. Shadows swung about the black interiors of the dead
monoliths. Nothing. Then Felon turned the spot, and sent its
powerful light across the water. Balg’s ship was growing in size as
they approached. Perhaps one hundred-fifty feet in length, it rose
from the waterline thirty feet to its top deck.

Felon pierced the surface of the flooded
street and stroked the corroded pavement forty feet below with the
angled beam. It flashed over barnacle-encrusted vehicles, a
corroded bench, a toppled light post then fell on the first of the
Swimmers. A great, distended blob, with bloated legs and head, it
bucked and thrashed away from the light like it was on fire. There
was a mob of them, floating and paddling around in the dark. The
moment the light passed near they dove and swam into the recesses
of submerged doorways and sunken subway entrances. He shone the
spotlight toward the yacht, and caught a few more gray eyes
disappearing in a splash. He let the light slide up the anchor
chain.