Rob Thurman - Roadkill

Niko’s hand rested on my chest. I saw the dark fluid that ran between his fingers, instantly covering his hand. With his other, he dug in my left jeans pocket. “Messy. I can always depend on you to be so damn messy… yes. Your sheer lazy ways save your life. Why am I not surprised?” He pulled out a Twinkie wrapper, uncovered the wound by pulling up my shirt with bloody fingers, and spread the plastic wrapper to cover the gunshot wound with it. The air that had been whistling in and out stopped. A Hostess wrapper wasn’t the next best thing to sterile, especially with a bit of crème still left on it, but it did get the job done. I could breathe the tiniest bit better. One death by sucking chest wound slightly delayed. Go team.

Nik kept his hand pressed to the wound, keeping the plastic airtight. “Rafferty, now. Kill that bastard now !” The Ördögs were dying in droves around us, Robin no longer looking as if he didn’t know what to do with his sword. He was an avenging angel, righteous with fury. An avenging, very horny angel. Ishiah was rubbing off on him, the avenging part at least. The metal flashes of the blade were so fast, so damn quick, I didn’t know if I saw it at all or if it was the streaks of light that heralded the darkness of approaching unconsciousness.

“Nik?”

He looked down at me, grim and furious, at fate… at me. I didn’t blame him either way.

Six months ago I had died… only I hadn’t.

And I didn’t plan on doing it for real this soon either. I wouldn’t put him through that again. Not now. Not for as long as I could avoid it. I wouldn’t do that to my brother. That was the easy way out, and while I liked easy, for Nik, I would and could do the impossible.

I wasn’t going to die and neither was Rafferty.

I spoke again before he could, feeling the blood trickle down from the corners of my mouth, hearing the faint gurgle behind my words. “I fought with… my girlfriend today.” I sucked in a breath and kept going. “Ate a Big Mac. Lost part… of me. A good part. Human part. I fought… for my… life.” I grinned at him, more blood in the back of my throat, rising higher. “Don’t you… fucking dare… think I’m… done yet.”

His hand, calloused from years of training, fighting, weapons sparring, rested on my forehead. “Promise, you bastard?” His mouth had always been home to the most fleeting of smiles, the wry quirk of lips, the angry line when someone crossed his, the twist of pain, the curve of belief. It was curved now. He believed. Of all the times I’d almost died, I wasn’t going to let a simple bullet accomplish where far less mundane motherfuckers had failed.

“Promise.” My grin became something else-not the grin of a little brother, but one of what Rafferty had labeled me: old and new; chaos and control. I let my head fall to one side to see Rafferty and Suyolak. Rafferty was on his knees. Good, ruthless, and maybe he could’ve taken Suyolak if it hadn’t been for Catcher and the rest of us pulling him into the depths like an anchor. He was on his knees protecting us while he had one breath left in him, but protecting and fighting were too much against the Plague of the World.

Too bad I was the Plague of the World as well or what was left of them. Or better yet, something the world had never seen. Suyolak was wrong. It had seen him, a long time ago. It had only just seen me, the new me.

Something old, something new, something unlike anything on this earth. I would keep one promise to Nik, I thought, but I’d have to break another to do it. I’d thought I’d need a compelling reason or an act of God to open another gate.

Suyolak was the compelling reason.

I was the act of God.

I couldn’t open one and appear next to Suyolak to shoot him before he stopped my heart. He would kill me before I pulled the trigger as much as I’d wanted to believe differently. He’d kill me if I even aimed my gun. But he couldn’t kill me before a thought was sent flying his way. After maybe, but there’d be no after for him. There was something I could do all right… something he wouldn’t anticipate. Something no one would think of. Something I’d only this moment thought of. Something fun .

I opened the gate.

I opened it in him… inside of him.

Ever see Fourth of July fireworks?

This was better. He glowed, bright as the scarlet moon, then brighter, brilliant as the sun, if the sun were an explosion of blinding silver light. Now there was a silver lining to a dark day. The light shone through his skin, his eyes, his open mouth as he screamed. And he did scream, the Plague of the World. He screamed until every Ördög and Wolf left screamed with him.

Me?

I laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh as it fought its way through the tide of blood. Fun? Goddamn, yes, it was fun. I meant it, too, and I felt it in every part of me. He’d been a disease that had enjoyed every death he’d caused. Rafferty was supposed to be his cure. I wasn’t anything close to a cure. I was the fire that made the scorched-earth policy what it was. If you burned it, you killed it. If you ripped a hole in reality that sucked the majority of Suyolak’s internal organs and torso into a radioactive dimension that no one had the key to but me, it was close enough.

He exploded. Fourth of July again. This time it was one big-ass M-80, those brutes no self- respecting adult would let a kid have. We hadn’t known any self-respecting adults when I was at the age when blowing up things was damn cool. I was twenty-one now and it was still damn cool. There was nothing left of Suyolak but arms, one leg, and his head lying on the ground with the amputation marks cauterized to a crunchy bacon crisp. I’d never been the freak-the Frankenstein’s monster-who cared about the neatness of my kills, but this time I did a nice job. Good for me. A for effort.

My grin faded when I saw Rafferty drop to his knees, grab the head, and then lift Suyolak face-to-face. There was the moon, but moonlight can be deceiving. I saw it, but I didn’t want to believe it. So I blamed it on the night and the shadows cast by the gory moon. I didn’t see Suyolak blink… although he did. I didn’t see Rafferty’s fingers sink through hair, flesh, and bone up to his knuckles, but they did. He wasn’t only mentally in Suyolak’s brain-he was physically there too. And suddenly the good time of watching Suyolak go to pieces in the most literal way passed and I slurred, “That’s so… not… right.”

“No, it is not, but it might be necessary and that’s good enough for me.” Niko called sharply, “Rafferty! Now! We need you now!”

The healer turned and I could see red-amber eyes turn Rom black and then back. Suyolak’s own eyes filmed a solid white and his head tumbled toward the ground, dust before it made it there. Rafferty was done with him. He had what he’d wanted all along: Suyolak. That was what made him tick-what made him creation and death all tangled into one immense tidal wave of power.

He moved to my side and knelt. “Great. What did you do? Shoot yourself?” His hand replaced Niko’s.

“Yeah.” The word was wet, as soaked as the oxygen in my lungs. Where he’d saved me from drowning in my own mucus before, now he had to stop me from drowning in my blood. No matter in what you drowned, the sensation sucked. “Watching… you pretend… to fight… made… me”-I gulped air-“suicidal.”

“You did a good job of it,” he grumped, enough like his old self that I almost forgot the flash of Suyolak that had passed through his eyes. But monsters, we always knew one another. He was Rafferty, but he had something else in him now: a reaper. He was a healer harboring a grim reaper and he couldn’t live like that. But right then I didn’t feel like I could live at all. It might be better to concentrate on that. I’d told myself I wasn’t letting Nik down and I meant it.