The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Page 11

  “Then why’d you stay? No one puts up with shit like this just because it’s their job.”

  There was silence for a few moments, and I wondered if she’d even heard me. Christ, what if I’d offended her? I had a knack for pushing too far. But then, finally, she spoke. “It was my sister.” Her voice was steady, but the sadness was evident. “Bluegate…Bluegate wasn’t good to her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Usual story. Drugs, gangs, prostitution. Only it wasn’t so usual when it was my own sister. I was still a beat cop then, and the system had already gone to work on me. I saw there was nothing that could be done with the city. Your best shot was to just try to get by, taking what you could get.”

  That nearly stopped me in my tracks. Had I heard her right? “You were crooked?”

  “Not at first. But after a while on the streets, it doesn’t seem quite so bad. You do your job well, and you’re barely rewarded for it. It’s not like you’re taking money from the innocent. And if you don’t take the bribe, they’ll find someone else who would.”

  I couldn’t believe it. She was so holy the Pope would beg to kiss her feet.

  And yet, I’d done worse than take a few bribes in my time. “We all do what we have to do.”

  “That was about the time Katie, my sister, started showing up on the street corners, filled to the eyes in Ink or whatever else she could get her hands on. We’d never seen eye-to-eye, me and her, and she didn’t take kindly to the way I tried to bully her out of her lifestyle.”

  There was bitterness in Vivian’s voice, a self-loathing emerging from beneath her perfect mask. I wondered if I was the first she’d talked to about this. Why the hell was she telling me?

  “She stopped answering calls,” Vivian said. “Mom and I lost contact with her for nearly a year. Until one day she showed up in Bluegate Hospital, beaten half to death by a rival pimp and his baseball bat. We thought she was going to die, God, some days I prayed she would die so she’d be put out of her misery, but she hung on. Only, she wasn’t the same afterward.” Her voice became quiet. “She’s in the nursing home these days.”

  It took me a moment before I could speak. “You visit her often?” I asked lamely.

  “Not as often as I should.”

  What the hell do you say to that? I couldn’t even comprehend it. I didn’t have any siblings, none that I knew of, anyway, but I tried to imagine. The pain, the guilt. Jesus, it was a wonder she hadn’t picked up a machine gun and gone postal on the pimp who’d done it.

  She was waiting for me to say something, I knew. I didn’t think she wanted me to make it better. She was smart, she knew I couldn’t do that. Hell, maybe she didn’t know what she wanted.

  I exhaled. “Vivian, I—”

  Something odd entered my perception, like an unusual sound or—no, the absence of sound. Like a plucked guitar string that had just broken. I turned around, staring past Vivian, back the way we had come.

  “What?” Vivian asked. “What is it?”

  I’d never felt anything like this before. It was like a wave, coming toward us from the Tunnel entrance. Like…

  Oh, fuck no.

  “The Tunnel’s collapsing,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Someone’s disturbed the Tunnel. It’s being obliterated behind us.”

  Vivian’s face wasn’t nearly as afraid as it should have been. “What do we do?”

  Oh Jesus. We were so screwed.

  “Miles?”

  “Run,” I said. “Run!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We weren’t going to make it. There was no way in hell. We were barely more than halfway through the Tunnel, and it was collapsing behind us faster than a junkie having a seizure. We were dead.

  I ran until my legs burned and my heart ached and I couldn’t suck in air fast enough. Vivian was doing better. She should have gone ahead of me, she was faster, fitter, but there was no way for her to pass me without us both colliding and going down in a heap. That was time we couldn’t afford to waste.

  There was a whistling sound behind us, and it was coming closer. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to know. No one had ever survived a Tunnel collapse. There had never been any bodies to recover. Only God knew what happened, and he wasn’t sharing.

  I panted and wheezed, forcing my bruised and aching legs not to give up. A little ripple ran through the Tunnel walls around us, the previously solid sides moving like jelly now. Safe to say, I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life.

  This wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. The circle was made out of goddamn iron. I’d done that for a reason. Even if something had washed away the Kemia and the symbols, once we were inside it should stay in place, even if it changed our destination or gave us a longer journey. The only way this could happen was if the iron ring itself had been broken.

  That meant someone was trying to kill us. And it looked like they might succeed.

  Something horrible screamed through the Tunnel. It didn’t sound human, but it sure as hell didn’t sound like a noise the Tunnel could make. Fear prompted me to find a little bit more energy and pump it into my legs.

  A piece of the Tunnel wall crumbled ahead of us, just flaking away like it was made of paper. As we raced past the gap I could see darkness and light swirling together in an impossible dance.

  “How far?” Vivian shouted between breaths.

  I didn’t have the breath to answer her, and it wouldn’t have been much help anyway. I’d lost all sense of time and distance. With the swirling of energy that was starting to peek through the cracks in the Tunnel and the pounding in my head, I had no idea where we were.

  The scream came from behind us again, so close I couldn’t help but glance behind us. What I saw scared the crap out of me.

  It was a creature of some kind, that was obvious enough. But it was nothing from Earth, and I’d never heard of anything like it in Heaven.

  It had at least six legs that I could see, all jointed in far too many places. A thick coat of black hair covered its back, and its face was a ravenous ball of teeth and tusks. The thing nearly came up to my chest, and if it stood on its hind legs, it could have given me a hell of a body slam.

  “Miles!” Vivian screamed, staring past me. I turned back just in time to see myself headed straight for a hole in the bottom of the Tunnel large enough to swallow me whole. Without enough time to think, I leaped, praying my legs gave me enough lift to get me over.

  My feet slammed back down on the other side of the hole, making new cracks appear. My knee shuddered in pain, but I didn’t slow.

  I glanced back to see Vivian clear the gap. The horrible creature screamed again, loud enough to make Vivian turn around. “Holy fuck. What is that thing?”

  “Don’t know,” I gasped. “Just run!”

  I sprinted down the Tunnel a few more seconds before I noticed Vivian footsteps were becoming fainter. I twisted around as much as I dared, not eager to fall into another hole.

  She was still running, but hunched over strangely. Oh Jesus, had she been bitten by that thing? No, wait, she was grabbing at her ankle while she ran, awkwardly pulling something out.

  And that was when I realized she had another gun.

  She ripped the small revolver from her ankle holster with a furious, sweeping motion, like she was a knight going to battle. Or in this case, like a suicide bomber.

  “Don’t!” I yelled.

  She didn’t hear me, or if she did, she didn’t take any notice. She spun, running sideways while pointing the gun at the hideous creature that bounded toward her, and pulled the trigger.

  The crack of the gunshot didn’t echo; it was just swallowed by the increasingly weak walls. The bullet left the gun in slow motion—literally—the physics of the shot messed up by the fracturing Tunnel. I got a chance to see shock on Vivian’s face before the gun exploded in her hands.

  Shards of the gun glowed an unearthly blue as they flew in every direction. Vivian s
creamed as they ripped apart the flesh of her hand, and I saw at least one fragment slice a scratch across her cheek.

  At the same time, the bullet slammed into the creature, moving slower than usual, but somehow delivering a powerful enough strike to shatter the thing’s skull and send pale pink blood flying behind it. It stumbled a few more steps before crashing down to the floor of the Tunnel.

  The Tunnel was wobbling like a bouncy castle now, though this ride was a hell of a lot less fun. I slowed down despite the approaching destruction. Vivian was still running, clutching her right hand in her left. I tried to ignore the way the blood dripped up, and grabbed her by the elbow. She grunted in pain, but now wasn’t the time for me to play gentle. I’d buy her a goddamn drink to make it up to her.

  “Can you make it?” I had to yell over the increasingly strange sounds coming from all around us. I could hear more of those things, those creatures, whatever they were, and some other noises that were unidentifiable. Over that was the crashing and snapping of the Tunnel breaking apart.

  Vivian nodded, her jaw set against the pain. She was a tough cookie. She pointed ahead while we ran. “There…is that…?”

  It was. By sweet Jesus and Holy Mary, it was. The shimmering end of the Tunnel, just close enough to make out. Maybe the collapsing Tunnel made the journey shorter, like the taut string snapping and flying toward the other end. It didn’t matter. We were nearly there.

  Then a wild screeching filled my ears, and I noticed the operative word in that sentence was “nearly”.

  I swept my nightstick from my jacket without looking and swung it backward in a wide arc. It cracked against something, and that something screamed and dropped away. I didn’t bother to find out what I’d hit. Truth be told, I didn’t want to know.

  We were so close now, so close I could see the familiar green sky of Heaven ahead of us. Something nipped at me from a hole to my right, but its jaws—or beak, maybe—closed on thin air.

  I risked a glance back, and stared into nothingness. The Tunnel was fracturing away behind us, exposing us to some madness I couldn’t even comprehend. Pieces of the Tunnel ripped apart and flew into the ether, or disintegrated right there. The edge had caught us. It was only a step behind. We were dead, or worse.

  And then I hit the rippling end of the Tunnel, going at speed, Vivian only half a step behind me. A huge bang came from behind us, and my vision spun with light and color. I was falling, but I couldn’t tell which way. We’d been too slow. It was over.

  My doom-laden reverie was abruptly broken when I slammed face-first into hard, red dirt. I skidded to a halt, my head spinning like a drunken ballerina, my hands grazed and my bruises screaming with fresh agony.

  I pried my eyes open, expecting to see that abyss, but it wasn’t there. It was then I realized the Tunnel was gone, and it felt like my awareness of it had been ripped out through my nose. Panting and trying to block out the pain, I pushed myself off the ground and spat out dust. “Goddamn it. I think I bit my tongue.”

  “I’m not kissing it better.” Vivian sat up, still clutching her wounded hand. It was bleeding, but it didn’t look too badly damaged. I could count five fingers, at least, and there wasn’t any bone sticking out.

  Vivian’s eyes went wide as she stared up at the sky that shifted through hues of green every few seconds, and across to the mountains in the distance that seemed to flicker and change positions every time I looked. “Is this…”

  “Yup.” I held out a hand to her and helped her to her feet. “Welcome to Heaven.”

  We weren’t quite where I’d intended to bring us, but the collapsing Tunnel hadn’t sent us as far off-course as I’d feared. We were in Suron, that much was clear by the wide cracks in the earth and the fractured mountains of iron-red dirt in the distance. They were sort of like Ayers Rock rip-offs, I guess, except these ones were flying. They floated a hundred or so feet off the ground, tethered to the ground by thin columns of rock that had no way of possibly holding it up under any laws of physics I was familiar with.

  In the distance was something that resembled an ant, but bigger than a house. It scurried across the sands, kicking up dust in its wake, until it reached one of the cracks in the ground. Without slowing it began to stretch in an impossible way, becoming thinner and distorting like a screwed up TV picture, before disappearing into a crack that a moment before wouldn’t have fitted one of its legs.

  I always liked the animals in Suron. They had character.

  Vivian rotated in a slow circle, taking in the surroundings. I’d been the same, first time I came to Heaven. It wasn’t the sort of place you drive through without noticing.

  I found my nightstick on the ground not far from where I’d landed. I slipped it back inside my jacket, not daring to look at the strange blood that graced the tip of it, and tried to find where the Tunnel exit had been.

  There, a piece of ground that was a bit darker than the rest, like the energy from the Tunnel had baked the dirt. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it didn’t surprise me. Accidentally losing control of a Tunnel caused a pretty decent release of energy. I hated to think what had happened when the Tunnel had been severed like that.

  I crouched down to study the ground, and heard Vivian’s footsteps crunch behind me.

  “What the hell happened, Miles?” she said. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” I said, more to myself than her. I stroked the corner of my mouth with my thumb. I was too confused to get defensive. “That Tunnel should’ve been strong enough to take any accidental damage without trouble.”

  “So…so someone did it on purpose?”

  “Looks that way.” I didn’t bother to wonder who. There were too many possibilities, especially if the gangs had caught on to what we were doing. Just too many people with too much at stake.

  “Not a very efficient way to kill us,” Vivian said.

  I stared at her. “Seemed pretty bloody efficient when those…those things, whatever they were, when they were attacking us.”

  She shrugged as if she hadn’t just had her own gun explode in her hand a few minutes ago. Women were good at ignoring the bits of logic that didn’t fit their argument. “Why not just put a bullet in our heads and be done with it?”

  “Maybe they intended to. Maybe we’d already gone by the time they arrived to drop us.”

  “Maybe.” To say she sounded unconvinced would’ve been a huge understatement. “Would your average gangster know how to make the Tunnel collapse?”

  All right, she had a point there. “Maybe they had another Tunneler with them. Shirley O’Neil seems to be pretty cozy with Andrews these days.”

  Vivian dropped the topic, for which I was grateful. Call me crazy, but there were only so many times I could discuss these sorts of close calls before I started wondering when they were going to be so close they were buried in my skull. Besides, I didn’t want to lose my nerve. It might be the one thing I had left by the time this was over.

  I set about trying to figure out where we were, which was never an easy task in Heaven. Some charlatans still stood outside the Bore selling maps to gullible saps. It never took the poor bastards long to realize you’d have more luck getting directions from a squirrel.

  I glanced up at the sun, or what amounted to the sun in Heaven—an amorphous blob of light and heat hanging in the sky like you’d expect a sun to. Except it didn’t rise and set like normal, it just seemed to move around wherever the hell it felt like. Occasionally you’d get lucky and it would stay in place for a few minutes, and you could get an idea of East and West from that, but today wasn’t that day.

  All right. It looked like we were doing this the hard way. If the floating mountains over there were the ones I thought they were, we weren’t too far wrong. Now it was just a matter of finding the city we were looking for.

  “Come on, then,” I said to Vivian. “You coming or what?”

  I tried to keep my legs from shaking as I walked.


  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My mouth was bone-dry by the time we finally came across something resembling a trail through the desert-like expanse of Suron. I was skeptical—anything less than a full-blown road in Heaven is notoriously prone to lead right off a cliff or into the lair of some strange and possibly violent animal, but we were running out of time. I put my concerns to Vivian, but she didn’t seem to grasp the potential danger of following it.

  “It’s just a path,” she said. “It’s got to lead somewhere.”

  I decided to strike off this decision and let her take responsibility for it when we found ourselves trying to make parachutes out of our jackets. If I was lucky I’d get the chance to say “I told you so” before we ceased to be in one piece.

  So I had to admit I was a little peeved when the trail actually did lead to a full-sized road, stone-paved and everything. Vivian had the grace to not look too smug.

  Decent roads were a fairly new addition to Heaven. Until they came into contact with humans, they didn’t have a single motorized vehicle. They still didn’t, technically, but within a few years of the first Vei to visit Earth bringing stories back to Heaven, strange new vehicles started appearing all over Heaven. The Vei refused to tell the human authorities where they’d got them, if they even knew themselves. Things had a way of just coming into existence in Heaven, so the Vei wouldn’t take any notice if one morning they woke up to find a brand-new car in their driveway.

  Of course, they didn’t have driveways, and the cars weren’t really cars. For one thing, they had skin. Shiny skin, for sure, that looked almost like painted metal from a distance, but if you ran your hand along it you’d find it was warm, and soft, and moving in that special way that only animate things can pull off. We passed a couple on the way, their red muscles contracting and cranking the wheels as they trundled along. The look on Vivian’s face would’ve had me in hysterics on another day, but right then I was too sore and tired to muster so much as a chuckle.