Rob Thurman - Roadkill

Hugs and kisses from Cal Leandros, shithead.

The doors didn’t creak spookily. No reality show ghost hunters/plumbers jumped out to wave idiotic electronic toys to either detect those passed on or snake your sink. As if when you died and there was life after death, which I highly doubted, you’d hang around the place where you took the big dirt nap. Get thee to a beach and haunt it if you have no place better to go. People-stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

But this was no illusion of a haunting. It wasn’t the site of a vengeful mass murderer lying in wait either. It was only a truck… with a coffin in the back, a coffin made of metal and with the lid pushed to one side. “The seals are broken.”

I could’ve jumped at the deeply somber voice right at my ear. Instead, I chose to give my balls a moment to descend and crabbed over my shoulder, “Do you want me to piss my pants, Nik? Seriously? Isn’t the car a little fragrant enough at this point?”

“As entertaining a story as that would be to tell, you’re correct. I apologize.” He rested a hand on my shoulder and hoisted himself up into the truck, not that he needed the support. Then again, maybe we both needed it in the coming battle. Rafferty had said it himself: Suyolak was better than he was. If he went down, we would have to step up, very probably only to follow the healer right back down. Fighting a losing battle is one thing. Fighting an absolutely hopeless battle is a different thing altogether. It certainly made catchy slogans harder to come up with. “I’ll be back.” Well, no, I won’t. “Yippe ki yay, motherfucker.” Too upbeat. “Hasta la vista, baby.” Too temporary and so idiotically clichéd. “I regret I have but one life to give…” Okay, that I could see. I did regret I had but the one life and that it wasn’t enough to kill the bastard. When you were Auphe and that wasn’t enough to kill something, damn if you weren’t having a seriously bad day.

I followed my brother. There was grit under the soles of my shoes, lots of it-probably what was left of those seals Abelia-Roo hadn’t kept up to OSHA standards, thanks to that overblown ego of hers. I should’ve known that from the first second she spoke to us. Abelia was many things, bad ones, familiar ones from my childhood, but she was also sharp as they came. Sometimes sharp wasn’t enough, though. She had a heart on its last legs, but she wasn’t anywhere close to senile. She did think a lot of herself, however, a damn lot, more than Goodfellow did of himself, if possible. The seals had failed because, unlike Rafferty, she thought she was better than Suyolak. If she’d thought less of herself, tried harder and stayed on top of her duty, the seals, and the iron coffin would’ve been sealed tight as it had been all those generations before.

But now we were left with an empty metal box filled with dust and a smell like a cobwebbed attic that hung in your nose and lingered on the back of your tongue. “I’ve always enjoyed a challenge,” Niko remarked, sifting through the powder to lift something out. “I think perhaps there are other things I could enjoy instead. Bonsai trees, painting, forging my own weapons. The opportunities are endless.” He opened his hand to show me the small braid of several yellowed hairs. “Voodoo.”

“Think it would work?” I perked up. Killing from a distance wasn’t usually my thing, but in this case, I’d make an exception.

“Unfortunately, no.” He dropped the braid and dusted mote-sized bits of Suyolak off his hands. Horton wasn’t hearing a Who on any of those-not unless it was a frothing rabid killer Who-and he wouldn’t want to listen to one of those anyway if he was smart.

“The driver’s dead,” Robin said a few feet below us. He was catless. Salome was not only not with him; she wasn’t in the car either. She’d jumped out of the window onto the top of another car that we’d passed at the ranger station going in the opposite direction. She must’ve decided, with whatever filled the empty space between her pierced ears, that not only was the station as far as she cared to go, but that, in fact, she would like to travel in a direction far from us. I thought her tail waved a cheerful good-bye, but it could’ve also been feline for Screw you and your little werewolves too . What did I know? It was a cat. Live ones were a mystery and dead ones… way out of the ball field.

“Great.” Although truthfully, I didn’t care one way or the other. Kirkland started this mess. Yes, to save his wife, and, yes, back me into a corner and I could say without a doubt I would’ve done it for Nik. But it wasn’t me. This wasn’t a hypothetical coulda woulda shoulda. Suyolak was gone and my empathy had gone with him, so the hell with the dead guy.

Niko jumped down and started toward the front of the truck, with me behind him. “Rafferty can’t save him? Bring him back?”

Robin snorted. “Jesus fresh off his Lazarus Tour couldn’t do a thing with this one.”

Both Niko and I still took a look for ourselves. The driver’s door was open, thanks to Rafferty or Robin. I was going with Rafferty, because I’d seen roadkill that was more photogenic than the late professor, and I couldn’t see Robin panting in anticipation for a closer look. Kirkland could’ve been a corpse that had lain under the desert sun for months. Dried skin shrunken to frame the skeleton, coarse short hair drained of moisture and color that had fallen away from the scalp in patches. Eyes turned to raisins in the hollow of his skull. He was a long-dead spider found under your refrigerator. A husk.

He looked quite a bit like Suyolak had in my head.

“Mihai, Yoska,” said Abelia, a still-scuttling spider chock-full of poison, standing behind us. “I might find a use for bits and pieces of him later. If nothing else, he’ll be a good attraction for the marks. Mummy man, cursed to death by the hand of the Rom. ”

“You are a shame on any people, including the Rom,” Niko retorted, but he stepped out of the path of the two men. It was simpler. An empty truck was easier for cops to overlook in their files than an empty truck with a dead man in it. The other two Rom stood to one side and respectfully behind Abelia while their brethren hauled the husk of Professor Kirkland over to the RV and stashed him away. The parking lot was empty by then. No one saw and if they had, they would’ve passed it off as a Halloween prop.

“Shame.” She spat on the asphalt. She did have a thing for the liquid expression of her emotions. “It is you who are the shame and your own blood the monster. Now let us find the other monster and end this business.”

“For the betterment of humanity and the improvement of the present company by your removal, I’m forced to agree with you.” Nik did have a way with an insult-a way that sometimes required a dictionary, but a way all the same. He turned his back on Abelia, another insult but more pointed, and shut the door of the truck. “Rafferty?”

“He is gone. On the hunt. Following prey.” Delilah had pulled up on her motorcycle seconds ago and was now undoing her braid, the silver hair falling to her waist. She too was ready for the hunt. Despite the purple shadows of twilight, she was a brilliant flash of white. Her hair, the leathers; she was the moon come to Earth. “We follow.” She stepped close to thread her hand in my hair and kiss me with a heat and familiarity that made it hard to forget that I’d had this so short a time. It seemed like years. I returned it with enthusiasm, refusing to wonder if I tasted different to her now. An extra dollop of Auphe in all likelihood would only make me spicier to Delilah. And there I was thinking about it after all, but before I could push it out of my mind, I heard a clearing of a throat. Niko. He was right; it had gone on for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the ability to store up sexual pleasure like British rock stars with their freaky Tantric batteries. I had to take it when I could get it. There was a cough this time that would be promptly followed by a thwack of a sword to the back of my knees if I didn’t step back.