Rob Thurman - Roadkill

Off to the left in a spill of light from a hole in the ceiling, I saw Robin swinging his sword and heads flying. Salome I didn’t see, but from the howling from farther in the darkened recesses of the hangar, she sounded like she was having fun. I finished with my first revenant and turned to the next. “You,” it hissed. “You dare come here. We know you. The Kin know you. You think you’ll leave here without one of us tasting your defiled flesh?”

“Defiled? Big word for you. Big word for me too; I won’t lie.” He was smarter than most of his fellow flesh eaters. That made him the one I wanted to talk to. “Wait here, would you?” I tossed the knife into his chest just to distract him before pulling at the broad axe I had strapped to my back and swinging it one handed. Its head was three times the size of a normal axe… Viking stamp of approval all the way. I could use a sword and was good enough to get by, thanks to Nik’s training, but I’d never be a sword person. And there was that heavy chain saw issue, but an axe… If there wasn’t anyone human around to see it, that didn’t work too badly either.

I swung and cut him in half at the waist like a magician with his assistant, only there was no putting this one back together again. “Abra-fucking-cadabra.” The milky white eyes widened, and mottled yellow and brown teeth, stained with blood and rot, bared in a silent scream as he separated and both halves tumbled into the shallow water. The lingering smell of a dead woman’s perfume on his breath didn’t make me too sympathetic. “Don’t go anywhere.” Then I gave him a savage smile. “What the hell, if you can go somewhere, give it your best shot.”

Retrieving my knife and sheathing it, I moved on. I took on three more revenants with gun and axe, reloaded, and went after two more. I tried not to look at the floating body parts that drifted here and there, but I was used to seeing things like that and going on with the fight. It was what you did. Or you slipped up and you died, and I’d done a damn lot in my day not to die.

Then there were the times in my life I had wanted to die.

But that was then and this was now. Things were different-a world of different. The only way I planned on dying now was if I screwed up, and I wasn’t planning to screw up. A weight tackled me from behind. I hit the water, rolled over onto my back, losing a few deep stripes of flesh on my shoulders to revenant claws trying to hold me down. Niko had taught me to break a hold like that and this revenant was no Niko. I dropped the axe, shoved the Eagle under his chin, and put two through the top of his bald head, the color of a toad’s skin. The skull shattered, which staggered it slightly. It was when I put the muzzle of the automatic to its neck and emptied half the clip into it, destroying the spine, that it was blown backward, never to get back up.

I surged to my feet, taking the axe with me, and headed toward about ten of them rushing Robin. Robin tended to have that effect on anyone who crossed his path. They either rushed him to molest him-I was sure that if it was for molesting, he was happy to have it-or to kill him. At least I knew he did have a problem with that last one.

“Why is it when I’m with you,” he remarked calmly as he took two heads in one stroke, “I’m given the tour of New York ’s most odiferous locations? Never are your enemies running perfumeries or fine gourmet chocolate shops. No. Sewers, troll caverns, abandoned asylums full of decomposing corpses, your building’s basement on your laundry day. I still debate to myself which has been the worst.”

“Think of your cat. It’s all for your cat,” I said as I took a head of my own with the axe and finished the clip off on my Eagle into another revenant. I didn’t take the spine out, but I did take both arms. If it wanted to kick me to death or take me out like the world’s biggest snapping turtle, it could go right ahead. And naturally it did. I didn’t have much respect for revenants, and compared to other predators in the city, they weren’t quite as efficient in their murderous ways. But that didn’t mean they weren’t killers or weren’t stubborn enough to come after you if all they were was a torso with one arm left to pull it along.

This time I passed the axe blade through his neck and his head flew into the darkness. All his stubbornness disappeared with it. I waited for more to come boiling out of the darkness in the rear of the hangar, but none did. But I heard something-hissing, groaning, and splashing, and quite a lot of all three. Followed by Robin, I headed into the dark. It was instinctual for people to stay out of the dark; that’s where the bad things were. My human half had outgrown that core of self-preservation a long time ago. Now the dark was where the money was. With the axe in one hand, I pulled my gun back out and used the rest of the clip to fill the roof of the hangar with holes. Daylight streamed in, letting us see better than any flashlight. If it was something we wanted to see.

It wasn’t.

It absolutely, completely was not.

Once… what was I thinking… a thousand times when I was being homeschooled by Niko, he dragged me to museums. If they didn’t have weapons or dinosaurs, I wasn’t much interested. But sometimes things stuck with me, like when your brother lectured you about fertility figures. The combination of horror and boredom etched itself into your brain. One museum statue he’d used had been a Venus. Not the good one, not the naked marble Venus with no arms, but nice breasts. No, he chose a small figure that would fit in your hand. Found in Germany or Austria or someplace with beer, it had a head but no face, and enormous pendulous breasts that hung over an equally enormous and pendulous stomach. The legs were tiny, the arms almost nonexistent. It barely looked human. In fact, it looked like Jabba the Hutt’s girlfriend. It was enough to put off a seventeen-year-old me from trying to get the newstand guy to sell me nudie mags for a week or two.

That little piece of BC art bore one hell of a resemblance to what was squatting in the back of the warehouse… except she had three rows of those huge breasts. She really was the size of Jabba, times two, and she was expelling fully formed and grown revenants through her giant-oh jeez. Okay, now I wasn’t off nudie mags for a week; I was off sex, and that was a much bigger loss.

I’d specifically not wondered where baby revenants came from when we’d gotten out of the Jeep. And here I was, finding out anyway. Ain’t that life? Life and pained eyeballs I suddenly didn’t want anymore. The new revenants would slide out and land in the water, splash feebly for a few seconds, then get to their hands and knees and crawl up the massive form that birthed it and, voilà, baby’s first swallow. Breast feeding, it was a beautiful thing.

Mommy had no legs from what I could tell, and small arms ended in flippers that she flailed around as she hissed at us, then gurgled slowly, “I hunger. Mother hungers.” The milky eyes were fixed on us, the mouth big enough to swallow one of us whole. “So very huuuuungry.” All the new revenants turned toward us, including the one that just plopped out with gnashing teeth and swiping claws, and wet with more than water. Green and black, mucus or slime-whichever, it flew through the air. The smell that went with it was equally as appetizing.

“Yeah. Okay. The miracle of birth.” I slammed a new clip home and tried not to gag. “You take care of this one, Goodfellow. I have some… ah…” Another one came gushing out. Plop. Splash. That was it. Celibacy. The priesthood. That was for me. “Interrogation. I have some interrogation to do. Have fun.”

“What?” Robin sputtered. “You bastard. You’d best not take a single step…”