The Shambling Guide to New York City (30 page)

A small part of her wished that she’d stayed up top to tell Fanny. This was not her fight.

Apep had captured one of the men in its coils and, from the pained look on his face, constricted tightly around him. Its tail whipped around to knock another to the ground, but he leaped out of the way.

Arthur battled the head, the short sword he’d taken from his abandoned duffel bag looking minuscule next to the snakelike demon’s yard-long fangs, which it bared as it danced around, looking for a proper place to strike.

The demon’s body bled in several places where the men had managed to wound it, but it seemed not to notice the cuts. Arthur’s injured arm hung awkwardly at his side, and his sleeve was dark. Zoë hoped it was from the water in the sewer and not blood, but the light wouldn’t help her identify it.

The men still hadn’t noticed her. Zoë realized belatedly that they probably couldn’t hear her, as they had been much closer to the demon when it had roared. Their hearing would be greatly muffled now.

The man in the demon’s coils cried out again as the thing constricted, and Zoë took a deep breath and dashed into the fray.

The snake, thrashing as it handled three assailants, reminded her of a rickety carnival ride: exciting, unpredictable, and completely life-threatening. It had yet to notice her, and she ducked the tail and rolled as it whipped around for one of the men again, gritting her teeth at the pool of dirty water soaking her further. She came up on her knees, slicing her right shoulder on a dropped sword.

“Oh that was just smooth,” she muttered.

“Goddammit, Zoë, get out of here!” Arthur had noticed her. His distraction nearly killed him, as the demon struck again, and he stumbled backward, falling into the water.

“You can’t battle this thing!” Zoë said, aiming for the demon’s midriff. Her attempt failed—it constricted again and her jab went into the water. The man groaned and slumped over—unconscious, Zoë hoped.

“What?” screamed Arthur, and Zoë remembered his ears had to be worse off than hers. She waved her hand at the snake hoping he’d understand that he had a bigger problem than taking care of her.

The tail whipped again, this time catching the third man and knocking him against the wall. He fell to the ground and didn’t move.

“Well, that’s just great,” Zoë said. The massive demon had turned to fix her with its gaze now, and Arthur jumped forward, sword raised.

“No, wait!” she yelled, but he didn’t hear her, or didn’t care, and as he brought his sword down, the head whirled around and knocked him over. He tumbled, dropping his sword, and Zoë held her breath. He writhed in the water, and she allowed herself a moment of relief that he was still alive. She focused on the issue at hand and remembered what Phil had said. As the demon came around to face her again, she leaped onto one of its coils and immediately drove her knife deep into its body.

The demon hissed loudly, clearly enraged, but its body relaxed. The man it held fell out of its coils and slumped on the ground. Zoë let go of the hilt, leaving the blade in the body, and ran to the demon’s head, which now lay flat on the ground, feet from where Arthur still groaned.

Zoë pulled off her necklace and put it in front of the demon’s face. “Apep, do you recognize this?”

It hissed again, its paralyzed body lax.

“You don’t speak English?”

It hissed again.

“Shit.”

She looked at the demon again. Sudden uncertainty washed over her. “You are Apep, right?”

It hissed again. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she took it as a yes. It seemed completely relaxed. She ran over to where Arthur had just sat up, looking at her. He held his head in one hand, stemming the flow of blood from his forehead.

His helmet was beside him, the light illuminating the six-inch-deep water. Zoë put it on her own soaked head and removed his hand to get a look at his injury. “Looks like a nasty bump, but a shallow cut. You’ll live.”

He squinted his eyes and cocked his head. “What?”

“Jesus,” she muttered. She raised her voice, “Can you hear me?”

“Barely,” he said, his own voice raised.

“You’re going to be OK. I’m going to check on the other guys,” she yelled.

He looked around blearily. “Why are you here? I told you to get out.”

“I’m not going to argue about this when I have to yell to communicate. We can argue when your hearing comes back.”

“What?”

Zoë groaned and went to check on the other men, unconscious but alive, slumped near the lax coils of Apep. She finally let out the breath she’d been holding and wondered how many ribs—or other bones—they’d broken.

“Are they OK?” Arthur shouted, getting to his feet and lumbering over to her.

“Yes,” she called, then gave a thumbs-up. “Well, they’re alive, both knocked out.”

Arthur bent over the demon’s head. “What did you do to it?”

She moved close to his ear again. “This is the chaos demon Apep. Cutting him does no good, you have to actually stab him and leave the weapon in him. That paralyzes him.”

He stared at her. “How in the hell did you know that?”

She shrugged. “I work with coterie. I think Apep understands that I’m trying to communicate, but I can’t understand his hisses.”

“Why would you want to communicate with it?” he asked, staring at her.

“Because I want to know what he’s doing here.”

“It was attacking Public Works!”

“Well, yeah, but Public Works isn’t a bastion of chaos. Phil thinks it’s here because the zoëtist is coming to do something bad.”

“What’s going on is attracting an Egyptian chaos demon? Jesus, that’s big,” he said. “We need to finish it off and then get some paramedics down here. How do we kill it?”

“Uh, all I know is you stab it to incapacitate it,” she said. “Phil didn’t tell me how to kill it.”

“I don’t suppose he would,” Arthur said. “I don’t know any snake who can survive being cut in half.”

“No, wait, Arthur!” Zoë yelled, but it was too late. He raised his sword with his good hand and dug it deep into the demon’s skin, cutting through and sawing. Apep, still incapacitated, hissed, but didn’t move, making it simple for Arthur to have at it, hacking and sawing, making the black ichor fly, and finally making it through.

Zoë backed up. She didn’t know what would happen, but she’d read enough mythology to guess. When Arthur had severed the two halves of the snake, the back half writhed in a way that turned Zoë’s stomach over; it was the agonized writhing
of the earthworms and garden snakes her grandmother used to attack with a hoe. But unlike those, this one didn’t eventually stop.

“Arthur. Get out of the way!” But either he didn’t hear her because of his ringing ears, or he chose not to hear the warning. He stood triumphant, covered in gore, watching the other half writhe. It was still dark, the haphazard light thrown off from the discarded hard hats casting bizarre shadows, but Zoë was pretty sure that Apep’s other half was, like an earthworm, going to be just fine.

Admit defeat, go off into the shadows
, Zoë thought as the headlamps played off an elongating snout, forming from the stump that had stopped streaming ichor. She ran forward and grabbed Arthur’s sword arm. “We have to get out of here,” she shouted, and saw his eyes were wide with shock.

Again, she thought of the people aboveground, and wondered why reinforcements hadn’t arrived. She could go get them, but didn’t want to leave the men. Arthur was the only one able—and he wasn’t very much so.

“It’s—” he said.

“Yes, you cut it in half and you made two fully functioning demons. You should try that with a cheesecake,” she said, dragging him away. “We need to get the others out of here. It’s going to be pissed.”

“No. I’m finishing this,” he said, and stepped forward.

She held him back. “How the hell do you plan on doing that? What if it’s a god, what if it can’t be killed, just pissed off more and more? You can incapacitate it indefinitely, but how will you kill it?”

He shook her off. “Then what do you suggest we do? We can’t leave, we can’t stay and fight, what can we—”

She didn’t hear the rest of what he said, because the new Apep
roared at them, and charged, slithering out of the shadows and rearing back like a cobra. He struck downward then, and Zoë pushed Arthur out of the way. The head knocked into her, and she felt as if she’d been hit by a car. She flew through the air and landed on something soft—quite soft—and bounced off, hitting the wall. She struggled to stand up, woozy from the fall, and realized she had bounced off the part of Apep that had been incapacitated.

Only now it seemed like a squashy Apap beanbag, and getting squashier as she watched it. She staggered around to the head, and saw the black eyes had lost their shine and had gone milky white. Was it dead, reincarnated in the new body? Her vision blurred; she must have hit her head pretty hard. She blinked and reached over to pull out the knife she’d stuck in the demon.

Not dead
, the voice whispered, and she paused, wondering if she was going mad or if she had just hit her head too many times. She grasped the knife, but then Arthur’s yell cut through the fuzzy feeling in her ears. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she pulled the knife out and ran to him.

The new Apep lay, stabbed in the side, beside a panting Arthur.

When Zoë approached, he surprised her by putting his arms around her. “Are you OK?” he asked into her hair, and she was very aware of how dirty she was.

“I hit my head, but I think I’m OK,” she said. “Are you?”

“Yeah, I got it after it hit you. We need to get someone down here to deal with this.”

“And paramedics,” she said, reaching up and gingerly touching the bump on his forehead again.

“So you don’t listen at all, do you?” he asked, but for once didn’t sound angry with her.

She shrugged. “I figured you needed the help.”

“You dying down here would be… very bad,” he said.

She laughed. “I can imagine. Tons of red tape for Public Works, and the fruition of whatever geas my boss has on you.”

He frowned, not upset, but more studying her. He touched her cheek lightly. “Yeah. Red tape. That’s the problem here.”

Her heart hammered as he distinctly was not letting her go. His arms felt different from Godfrey’s, and different from John’s.

“Um,” she said, cursing her awkwardness. She should have been smoother, but she had never before stood in a sewer, dirty and bloodied, covered in demon gore, and attempted a first kiss. She didn’t know the etiquette.

“I can’t figure you out, Zoë,” he said, his voice soft. “You work for vampires, had an encounter with an incubus, and yet you’re here trying to save us from a demon.”

She blushed and looked away at the mention of John. “I just am trying to do my job and do the right thing at the same time. I can’t help who my coworkers are, and my workplace doesn’t have sexual harassment laws.”

He grinned and took her chin to make her look at him again. “You think I never had an encounter with a succubus? They’re dreadfully hard to fight when you treat them as a hostile. I can’t imagine what it would be like to work with one.”

“You don’t want to,” she said, shuddering.

“Let’s get patched up and cleaned up. Then I would like an opportunity to figure you out,” he said.

Was he asking her out? His grip did not relax. She smiled at him. “That works.”

The door to the basement opened then, and he let her go. “Dammit,” he murmured, but went to greet his coworkers.

“We need paramedics down here,” Arthur reported.

“We had a zombie attack! Midday!” the man said. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore. And what the fuck happened
down here?” He stared at the two demons, the broken water main, and the bodies of his coworkers.

“Immortal, regenerating water demon, near as I can tell,” Arthur said. “Need to keep it impaled to incapacitate.”

Zoë left him to do his report and went back to examine the first Apep. Had he sent his life force to his other half?

It seemed a little farther away than before, its ragged end still oozing where Arthur had cleaved it in two. She reached the head, which lay in the shadows. She had no chance to react when it moved quickly, its mouth opening and opening, and then closing over her.

Gross.

She couldn’t breathe. The demon moved: she couldn’t tell if it was moving quickly, but she could feel its muscles contract around her. She could barely move, stuck in the beast’s esophageal tract. Its muscle constricted as it swallowed, and she groaned as she was crushed. Then it relaxed a bit, and she was able to move. Was she in its stomach? Was she being digested?

Did Arthur notice she’d been eaten? Was he fighting to stop this monster again, or was he worried about making a third incarnation?

She realized her hands were empty; she must have dropped her knife when it attacked her. She couldn’t reach the knives at her belt. She struggled a bit, realizing that this was very bad. Her lungs began to burn.

One hand was stretched above her head, one down by her waist. The muscles around her constricted and she struggled in earnest now, moving farther down its gullet.

Her fingers brushed against the hilt of the second knife at her side. It was something. She threw her strength into slightly
bending her wrist away from her so she could pull the knife free, and the blade slid along her leg, parting her jeans and cutting her. She paid no attention to the pain, focusing instead on using the knife before she passed out. Red blooms appeared behind her eyelids. Apep’s muscles closed again, and she slid farther.

This time her hand felt cold air instead of hot snake. It hadn’t healed fully; it was still open at one end. She finally maneuvered the blade away from where it dug into her left hip and sank it deeply into the snake’s esophagus.

It relaxed around her. She had wiggle room now, and flailed her hand about in the air, trying to grasp onto anything to gain purchase to pull herself out. But even with the snake incapacitated, she still couldn’t move easily, and she was starting to feel dizzy now, the need to breathe in starting to overwhelm her.

So close
, she thought, trying to wiggle down the tight, slimy tube. The pounding of her head combined with the lack of oxygen won out, though, and as she was birthed in a disgusting wash of blood and bile, she hit the floor and passed out.