Okay … I’ll just wait for it to go away. Someone else in the building must have heard that jibbering outburst—any such disturbance usually caused their Filipino landlady to go ballistic. Never before had Todd so eagerly awaited one of Mrs. Mazola’s tirades. But she didn’t come. No one came. The building was dead silent.
Suddenly, there was a sound he did recognize: the familiar homely jingle of his mother’s key ring! Oh my God—was it her outside the door? But that scream … ? The thought was too baffling to contemplate. Before he could stop himself, Todd crossed to the door and listened, heart pounding. Yes, those were definitely her keys … but why was it taking her so long? He started crying with terror and despair, unable to comprehend how it could be her who had made that noise. What was wrong with her? He wasn’t sure he could bear to know.
“Mom?” he whispered, his lips touching the cracked paint.
There was no answer except that idiot jingling. It was taking much longer than it should to unlock the door, as if the person outside was deeply, moronically engrossed in those keys. That was enough; he had to do something. Todd connected the security chain, gingerly turned the bolt, and opened the door a crack …
And slammed it shut again.
And screamed.
The thing out there—that demonic blue hag that somehow resembled his mother—lunged against the door, barely too late. It screeched furiously, and Todd could make out some of the garbled words this time:
“—HEEETODDEEOHHTODDEEMYTOD-DEESWEETBABYOHBABEEEEE—”
“Mom, no!” he cried, as the thing hit the door again, splitting the frame. Once more, and it would give.
Chest heaving, he ran for the bathroom and locked himself in. As he stood there listening, his gaze was fixed on his own reflection in the mirror: a wiry, wild-eyed boy, skin deathly pale and etched with runic black vines, whose blue eyes stared back at him under an overhanging shock of blond dreadlocks, as if awaiting some cue.
His eyes were drawn past the mirror to the air vent beside the toilet. This was an old building, an old hotel converted to apartments, and instead of a window in the bathroom there was an air shaft covered with a cruddy metal grate. While sitting on the toilet, Todd often heard the intimate sounds of other tenants using their bathrooms, a bit of voyeurism that he found endlessly, disgustingly fascinating. There was also something distinctly creepy about it, that barely visible dark shaft in which anything could be hiding and peeping back at him. Sometimes when he went to the bathroom late at night, he envisioned a weird, spidery man who lived behind the grate, scuttling up and down the shaft or huddling only inches away as Todd sat on the toilet. Mr. Green.
He heard the outer door crash open. The fearsome thing that had been his mother entered the apartment like a violent wind, upending furniture and tearing everything apart as it ransacked the place looking for him.
Todd opened the medicine cabinet. On the bottom was a plastic margarine tub full of tweezers and toenail clippers, and there was also a small multipurpose tool with pliers and a screwdriver. Using the screwdriver, he knelt on the toilet lid and went to work on the screws securing the air-shaft grate. Musty warmed air blew in his face. At first he almost gave up—the screws were old, tight and thickly painted over—but he stuck with it and suddenly the yellow enamel cracked off like candy coating. The first screw turned.
The thing outside grabbed the knob and slammed into the bathroom door.
Todd flinched, fumbled, then got the screw off. The second screw was easier, and the third and fourth didn’t have to be removed at all—he found he could pry the grate open without touching them.
He stuck his head into the shaft and looked down. It was gross, black with greasy lint, utterly dark and forbidding. Not to mention deep—their apartment was up on the third floor.
The bathroom door was warping, cracking, sending splinters of wood bouncing off the walls. Any second it would give, and that would be it—there was no place left to hide. A hideously mangled blue arm snaked through a hole in the plywood and thrashed around in the close space, straining for him. It could just touch, its fingertips grazing his shirt.
Ducking and dodging, Todd grabbed an armload of towels off the shelf and stuffed them down the chute. He did the same with the towels on the racks, then with the thick, shaggy bathmat. Finally, he climbed up on the toilet lid and squirmed feet first into the tight shaft until he was completely inside, painfully dangling by his armpits.
The bathroom door smashed inward.
Todd let go.
It was over very quickly: a brief plummet down a furry chimney, then his body slammed through something soft with a loud, concussive bang—it was his towels on a sheet-metal panel that collapsed beneath him and tumbled him into the basement.
Todd came to his senses in a pile of gallon jugs of used fryer oil. The wind had been knocked out of him, and he was covered with sticky black fluff, but he was not in pain. Later, he would feel it. He had bottomed out in the big main heating duct that fed the building, the force of his impact popping all its metal rivets and collapsing the duct like a cardboard box. Beside him, the ancient furnace was shuddering, squealing as if mortally wounded, its flame snuffed out. The basement was filling with the stink of gas.
Though still stunned, Todd forced himself to move; he didn’t want to see what might follow him down that chute. He was nearly up the stairs when the gas exploded.
The force of it hurled him out of the basement like a powerful shove. He picked himself up, shrieking, “Help! Help!” as he ran down the building’s back corridor. He was facing an array of doorways: the restaurant kitchen, the utility room, the stairway to the apartments, the fire exit. He was surprised to see the exit door wide open to the back alley, and a trail of odd debris—shoes and torn clothing—strewn across the floor. That door was never supposed to be left open; Mrs. Mazola was a fanatic about that, just as she was about any kind of mess in her building. But Todd didn’t have time to think about Mrs. Mazola—all he saw was the open door to the outside.
As he rushed for it, something flew out of the stairwell and knocked him down. Crazy whipcord arms skinnier than his own wrapped around his neck, and a gaping, ravenous fish mouth sought his. In the sickly, strobing fluorescents, Todd recognized the overpowering perfume of his tiny landlady, Mrs. Mazola.
If he had been caught completely off guard, Todd would have had no chance against the rabid attack, but his blood was already running so high with adrenaline that his own panicked reflexes bordered on the supernatural.
Screaming, he dove with his clinging attacker straight into the sharp steel edge of the doorjamb, using it as a wedge to pry them apart. Already he could feel his thoughts blurring from the lack of oxygen. He tried to say,
Lady, quit it!
but no words would come out. The woman showed no signs of slacking, and Todd kept frantically thrusting her against the metal door flange as if trying to saw off an unwanted Siamese twin. The sharp edge gashed Mrs. Mazola’s purpled face and arm to the bone, smearing inky black blood all over Todd and the wall … but she just wouldn’t let go.
In a final, extreme feat of desperation, Todd lugged her over to the big industrial fire extinguisher. Todd and his buddies often dared each other to shoot this thing off in the alley, but they had never gone through with it. They were too terrified of the wrath of his crazy landlady. Little had they known!
Blacking out, barely able to think another second, Todd yanked out the extinguisher’s safety pin, grabbed the rubber hose, and rammed its nozzle down Mrs. Mazola’s yawning black gullet. Then he squeezed the handle.
The result was instantaneous—and spectacular: She broke off in a backward somersault, vomiting incredible billows of white chemical dust all over the room and vanishing in the cloud.
Without looking back, Todd scrambled clear and bolted through the red fire door to the alley.
CHAPTER NINE
INQUISITION
“
C
an I trust you boys to behave?”
Todd and Ray warily nodded, squinting up at the bright blur of their interrogator. The light in their faces was blinding. Averting their eyes, they could see they were in a fancy public restroom with gold fixtures and black marble tile. Their butts ached from sitting on the hard, cold floor.
The man was wearing a peculiar helmet, a tall black tube with flat sides, crimped in back like a rudder fin, with a cross-shaped hole in front for him to see through. He asked, “What exactly are you two trying to do?”
“Join you,” Todd said. His tongue felt like a dead slug.
“Why is that?”
“We don’t want to end up like those blue freaks out there.”
“You say you came from a ship. What was the name of this ship?”
“It didn’t have a name. It was a decommissioned nuclear submarine.”
“Who else was on this submarine?”
“A lot of people. You want a list?”
“Was the Demon Lulu on the submarine with you?”
“Lulu? You mean Lulu Pangloss? What about her?”
“You know her!”
“We did. Until she became a Xombie.”
“You are minions of the Blue Fury! Admit it!”
“Sir, the last we heard of Lulu was that she was going ashore. We never saw her after that.”
“Liar! You are spies of hers! Why else would you have come ashore?”
“We were short of supplies, so the crew sent us out for more.”
“Weren’t you worried about Hellions?”
“Hellions?”
“Xombies. Exes. Maenads.”
“We couldn’t see any from the boat. We thought the coast was clear. We were wrong.”
“Why would you assume the coast was clear?”
“We were desperate.”
“Or was it that your Mistress sent you to infiltrate and undermine our holy mission?”
Ray said, “That would be so cool. But no.”
“Liar! You are agents of evil, slaves and supplicants of the Shevil!”
“The what?“
“The She-Devil!”
Todd said, “That’s
bullshit
, man,
bullshit
. For one thing, Lulu was just a messed-up chick, not some kind of … Shevil. For another, we had no idea you even existed, or we would have tried to contact you. Why else would we have been desperate enough to go ashore? We had no weapons, nothing. We saw almost forty of our friends get killed, either by Xombies or by Reapers, so you can go fuck yourself!”
“Todd,”
Ray hinted through his teeth.
“I’m cool, I’m cool.”
At Todd’s outburst, their interrogator mellowed his tone. “Perhaps you are telling the truth. Or perhaps not—we will see. I just have a few more questions, and I suggest you answer truthfully because you will be judged. Not by me, but by the Lord Adam, Blessings Be Upon Him.”
“My bad. Go ahead.”
“Do you repent your sins?”
“Definitely!”
“Have you rejoiced in the company of homosexuals?”
“What?”
“I assume you are repenting being Sodomites and sexual deviants?”
“That’s not really—”
“There’s no need to lie. We have signed affidavits testifying to your perversions at Thule.”
“
Thule!
Are you kidding? We were
prisoners
of those motherfuckers!”
“That’s immaterial,” the man said mildly. “Are you sexually attracted to each other?”
“No!”
“So you are free of sin?”
“No—just not that one.”
“Are you prepared to take a vow of chastity from this day forth?”
Sensing closure, both boys jumped at it. “Hell yeah.”
“Do you love America?”
“Of course.”
“Are you true patriots? Would you die for your country?”
“Yeah … probably.”
“Then why aren’t you dead, like so many other patriots?”
“Why aren’t
you
?”
“Because I have a sacred duty to perform. Answer the question!”
“Well … same here.”
“Which is better: the Prophet Jim or the Apostle Chace?”
“Uh, Jim?”
“Both are equal in the eyes of the Lord! Do you believe in the Resurrection of the Moguls?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Are you prepared to swear loyalty to the Lord Adam, the Lord’s Prophet Jim, the Lord’s Apostle Chace, and all the Living Saints of the Adamites?”
“Uh—sure.”
“What is His purpose in revealing Himself at this time?”
“Who?”
“The Prophet Jim.”
“I … don’t know.”