The Nine Read online

  She stared into my eyes for a moment, then whizzed past me again.

  I shook my head and spun in time to see Alex push her way through a set of ordinary looking double doors. I scrambled to follow her, pushing on the opaque glass instead of the dirty brass plate. The door swung open to reveal a bright room of black lockers. Some appeared to be the type you might find in any gym, but farther into the room they increased in size until they grew big enough to accommodate the Incredible Hulk after a year of ice-cream binges. The height of the ceiling increased too, making the huge room appear like an upside-down swimming pool with the monster section at the deep end. The larger lockers were equipped with gigantic handles and locks that might be operated by anything from a gorilla to a giant-hoofed elephant beast. The Judas Agency was definitely diversity friendly. It would explain why Alex and I wound up in the same locker room.

  Something flew at my head as I passed the second aisle. I managed to raise a hand in time to bat a yellow galosh-style rain boot out of the air. The banana colored projectile rebounded off the locker next to me with a loud crash. I glimpsed Alex throw the second one—this one olive green.

  “You are going to need these.” Alex searched an open rack of coats, checking each of the tags. “Those stupid high-tops will soak up anything you step in, and I’ll have to carry you home whining and crying about your feet. What size coat do you wear?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but I never got close.

  “Forget it, here’s an extra-large. It’ll work for now.” She tore a stained orange-ish colored coat off a hanger and tossed it to me as well. A knee length overcoat fit for any formal homeless occasion. Streaks of grease and dirt adorned every side, and it bore the distinct human odor of someone oblivious to the words soap, shampoo, or deodorant.

  “I am not putting this on.” I ground my teeth and held the coat out at arm’s length. “I’d be better off wearing a rabies-infected raccoon.”

  “Pile—of—hot—goo.” Alex stretched out and enunciated each word as if this was all she should have to say.

  We stared each other down for a moment. I was not losing this one. She broke first.

  “I knew it.” She shrugged and shook her head. “Do whatever you want. You’ll come back either way. I just wanted to save myself a trip to the fields.”

  Alex crossed the aisle, pressed her palm to a scanner and a locker popped open. This one seemed to be more stout than some of the others, and I soon saw why. Alex drew out a Ruger LC9 pistol and tucked it into the back of her pants, pocketed two spring-assisted knives, and slid an old-time single barrel derringer into her boot.

  I tried to act nonchalant as I dropped my bio-culture jacket on the floor and walked over to the coat rack. The first three were mediums. There was a yellow slicker in my size, but it appeared to be in even worse shape than the one I dumped. Didn’t anyone around here know about dry cleaners?

  I finally ran across a brown overcoat that seemed halfway clean and didn’t smell like someone died in it. I pulled it off the hanger and looked at Alex. She stared at me with her arms crossed, wearing the expression of an impatient grade school teacher.

  “All set?” Alex shot me a cynical smile and turned to walk away before I could answer.

  “Hold on. Don’t I need some sort of weapon?”

  “Nope.” Alex kept walking.

  “How about some matching boots.” I held up my yellow and green galoshes. “Is that too much to ask?”

  “Put them on. Or don’t. I don’t care.”

  “This is ridiculous.” I ran down the aisle and chased her out a set of double swinging doors doing my best to shrug on the brown lice factory I had scored from the coat rack. “Can you at least tell me where we’re going? What’s our mission?”

  A vision of Judas rushed into my head, and my voice cracked. All of a sudden I felt less like I was trying to survive my first day on the job and more like a preschooler conducting a mafia interrogation.

  I cleared my throat and crossed my arms, trying to look relaxed and casual, holding a galosh in each hand so they hung out of my armpits. “I think I have a right to know where we’re going and stuff. Not that I care. I just want to know about our mission, so I can do it better. Work with you and all, I mean. It would help if I knew the mission, that’s all.”

  She blinked and kept walking. I shut my mouth before she did us both a favor and shot me.

  “Your mission is to get down the hall and onto a nice elevator.” She pointed straight ahead. “If you’re good, I’ll let you push the button.”

  The new area felt like backstage to the insanity show we’d been in earlier. The hall was quiet and barren, with unfinished rafters and conduit lining the bare grey walls. Alex’s boots clacked along the cheap tiles and echoed off the tall cavernous ceiling. I kicked my white high-tops off ahead of me, so I could pick them up on the way by, and hopped on one foot so I could pull on the green rain boot.

  My maneuver stunted my pace, and Alex pulled ahead. I ran a few steps to catch up, smack-swishing between my sock foot and the boot, then jumped along behind her for a few more seconds to pull on the second boot.

  Alex rounded a corner and disappeared. I hopped after her, only to find she had stopped. I tried to stop as well but couldn’t get my foot down in time. I fell flat on my face instead, then looked up. Alex glanced down at me, shook her head, and pressed a button next to an ornate elevator.

  I hauled myself to my feet and gave Alex a serious look. “You said I could press the button.” I tried to appear indignant as I finished pulling on my boot and stood next to her.

  “I said if you were good.”

  I harrumphed and looked at the doors. Like other areas in the Agency, they had scenes carved into their shiny brass surface. They depicted different versions of the same place in rows that ran the door’s length. The first was a normal city street. Something you might see in downtown Chicago or New York. The next showed the same place, war torn and broken. The one below that showed the buildings intact, but the people lay dead in the streets, apparently from some sort of disease or plague. A third painted a colorful scene of horrific poverty and crime. There were several others, portraying every way a peaceful happy place could be destroyed. A real conversation starter for anyone contemplating suicide.

  The elevator doors opened, sparing me from seeing any more, and I followed Alex inside. We both turned to face the front. I peered down at my mismatched boots. Not only were they two different sizes, they were both left feet. Alex grinned. This was going to be the beginning of a long and painful relationship.

  Chapter Ten

  It had been a long time since I had walked the Earth, but I remembered lots of things from when I was alive. The sound of a V8-engine, the way the summer sun warmed my face, and the fact that elevators weren’t supposed to accelerate like the Apollo 11 spacecraft. I didn’t recall passing out or landing on terra firma, but I would, for the rest of my long and tortured eternity in Hell, remember the smell that immersed my face when I woke up. If odor possessed a corporeal presence, this one would invade your nostrils like a gallon of liquefied whale guts and swim out your eyes through ammonia tears.

  I lifted my face out of a wet paste and opened my eyes. A thin layer of sawdust clung to my fingers as I tried to wipe the goo away. My vision cleared enough for me to make out Alex sitting on a broken-down split rail fence several yards away. She winked and gave me a wiggly fingered wave.

  “Good morning, sunshine.” Her grin stretched ear to ear in the moonlight. It was all she could do to contain herself. I lay on some sort of mound, putting me eye level with her. When a 500 lb. hog wondered by and shot me a disparaging glare, everything became clear. I had landed face down in a huge pile of pig crap.

  It was all I could stand. I got to my feet and shook off my coat, showering my boots in a cloud of dried hog hunks. If Alex had given me a gun, I wouldn’t have bothered to get up.

  My mismatched lefty galoshes sunk into the manure, starting a mini
crap-alanche as I stomped down the hill. Alex let out a laugh. “Cool off there, stud. It takes a little practice to make those landings. At least you hit something soft.”

  “That’s not the only thing I’m going to hit.” I clenched my teeth and fists and continued toward her. She did have a gun, and I couldn’t really punch a woman. So I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got to the fence, but it didn’t matter. For a little payback, I would chance getting shot. Even the Gnashing Fields couldn’t compete with the maliciousness of Alexandrea Neveu.

  Alex glanced toward the ground, and her smile disappeared. A moment later she was off her fence perch and scrambling in my direction, “Wait, don’t come any farther.”

  I thought she had threatened me at first, but then I noticed the panic in her eyes.

  “I’m not kidding.” She held out a hand. “This is one of those lessons I warned you about earlier. You know, about coming back as a pile of smelly goo?”

  I stopped, breathing hard and ready to pounce if she tried some sort of trick. The games would end now, one way or another.

  “See that?” Alex pointed at the ground in front of me. I let my gaze flick down for a quick moment, careful not to tip my head and give her a free shot.

  “It’s a puddle,” I said. “So what?”

  “Look around. There are puddles all over the place. It rained recently, and rain is one thing we avoid up here. You sink a foot into a rain puddle or get caught out in a storm unprotected, and the rain water will melt you like butter in a microwave. Remember the witch in the Wizard of Oz. Someone got that one right. Our best kept secret, loose in a children’s book.”

  Alex pointed at my open coat and mismatched boots. “I didn’t dress you in that getup for kicks—well, not completely. Rain water to us is like sunshine to vampires. Only thing worse is holy water. That’s like swallowing a hand grenade and jumping into a fuel truck. Not pretty at all.”

  I did my best to keep that visual from being added to my library of nightmares, but it had already been cataloged and stored for later. I possessed an all new appreciation for my mismatched boots and homeless slicker.

  “If we can’t get wet, how do we function up here? Water is in almost everything, even people.”

  Alex let out an exhausted sigh. “I said raaaainnnnnn waaaaaterrrrrrrr. Clean the pig crap out of your ears. If it is processed for drinking, in food or—well, poop.” She laughed a little bit at that. “Or anything else, the water doesn’t affect us. Only the wet stuff that comes straight out of the sky. Something about The Nine and the way the Woebegone are put together, I guess. All I know is stay away from it unless you like bathing in battery acid.”

  Alex turned and began walking up the dirt drive toward a dark farmhouse, making sure to steer clear of any more puddles. I assumed her tall combat boots were waterproof, but even a splash would be bad if rainwater was as horrible as she said. Even drying things off could be a problem.

  The full moon cast plenty of light for us to see, so I fell in step behind her, making sure to sidestep the little death pools as well. “So, is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “Do kittens cause herpes, or should I stay away from face-eating ice cream cones?”

  “I don’t know what you did with kittens when you were alive but stay away from them.” Alex curled her upper lip in disgust. “Other than rainwater, we are all but impervious to things up here. It would take nothing short of a C4-throw blanket to make you to say ouch. We heal almost instantly, as long as we’re here among the living, and we don’t need to eat or sleep. Provided we don’t run into a spring shower, we’re golden.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Do me a favor,” Alex stopped and poked a finger in my chest. “When you decide to test your invulnerability later, and I know you will, do it when I’m not around. I don’t want to watch you slamming creative appendages in car doors or anything.”

  I cringed. “Why would you think of a thing like that—never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  We made our way to a Jeep sitting next to the house. Alex opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  “What are you doing?” I lowered my voice in case someone lurked inside the house.

  “Getting us a ride. You didn’t think we would walk everywhere, did you?”

  “What if the people inside wake up?”

  “What if the people inside wake up?” Alex mocked in a high over-theatrical voice. “You are an invincible agent sent from the depths of Hell, remember? Demon up a little bit and stop embarrassing yourself.”

  “Fine.” I stood up straight, walked around to the other side of the jeep and got in.

  Alex scrutinized me with a brow raised. “You aren’t going to start pouting and talking to yourself, are you?”

  I stared out the windshield and deadpanned, “If I don’t answer the voices in my head, who else will?”

  Alex peered at me a moment longer, then dropped the conversation and pulled a flat black box no bigger than her hand out of her pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  She touched the shiny surface and a screen came to life in a color display that seemed almost three-dimensional. I probably looked like a kid who had just watched Santa rattle down his chimney and land in his living room. I couldn’t help myself. I had never seen anything so incredible.

  “It’s a smart phone,” she said, looking exasperated. “You know, like an Android.”

  My eyes got wider. “Android? Like a robot? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Alex rolled her eyes and turned toward the wheel. “Yes, this is a miniature robot, and he is going to climb under the hood and start the engine with a magic key it produces out of its butt.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  She waited a second then touched the screen again. The Jeep came to life in a startling display of lights, moving pictures, and more color screens.

  “No, this is not a robot, it’s a phone. It has a computer inside though. Everyone from a prepubescent teenager to a geriatric mouth breather has one. Mine just has a few bells and whistles the Topsider’s don’t. Like a hack that will start almost any keyless ignition.”

  I blinked.

  “This is going to be a very long night.” Alex put the Jeep in gear and rolled out of the driveway. I tried to relax and pretend the UFO array on the dash was something I saw every day.

  “Look, I haven’t been up here since 1988. Things may have changed a little, but I’ll be fine. The world can’t be that different.”

  Alex nodded. “Really? I suppose all the cars had beverage dispensers back in your day.” She pointed to a button in the middle of the dash labeled with a big red triangle.

  “Some,” I lied. “I’m sure they weren’t as advanced as the ones you have now.” I tried to sound bored to cover the amazement pounding the inside of my head.

  Alex nodded, looking impressed. “Where did the drinks come out back in your time?”

  I looked around and saw two circular sections behind the gearshift. “Same as yours.” I made a general motion toward the area in case I happened to be wrong.

  “Well, I stand corrected. You are far more worldly than I thought.” She gestured to the bright television screen showing some sort of moving map with a tiny picture of a vehicle in the middle and a bunch of figures and numbers along the edges I didn’t understand. “Can you program the flight computer for me? I have a tough time with it while I’m driving.”

  I tried not to squeal like a six-year-old getting her first Barbie. Of course cars could fly. Alex owned a hand-held computer phone. Maybe an android, I still wasn’t sure about that. Flying back and forth to work was probably no more unusual than camping out for concert tickets.

  “I thought you were some sort of expert,” I said, visions of the Back to The Future movies dancing in my head. “You can’t even fly a simple car? Pull over, and I’ll fly.”

  Alex held out for about three seconds before she broke out laughing.<
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  “The car doesn’t fly, does it.” The words came out as a statement more than a question.

  Alex shook her head and tried to control her laughter.

  “No drinks, either?” I said.

  She lost control again, tears streaming from her eyes. “Not as advanced as the ones you have now,” she mocked, and cackled again.

  “All right, all right, I deserved that one.” I stared out the passenger window to hide the heat rushing into my cheeks. “So, I need to catch up a little. I’ll figure it out.”

  Alex took a deep breath and blew it out with a whistle. “Listen.” She let out a few more chuckles that threatened to reignite her laughter again, but she managed to keep them under control. “I will make you a deal. I will try,” she drew out the word try for emphasis, “to be more patient when explaining our modern advances, and you stop pretending to know about things like flying cars and drink makers.”

  Alex stayed quiet for a moment, and I turned to look at her. As soon as our eyes met, we burst out laughing. After a moment, we quieted down, and I stared out at the road. There wasn’t much to see in the dark. Trees, boulders, and hillsides blurred past us as Alex navigated the serpentine dirt road. There were no streetlights or buildings. Just an eerie expanse of shadows.

  I leaned forward, opened the glove box and rummaged through. At least they still worked the same. When I didn’t find what I searched for, I lifted the center console in the armrest. Jackpot. A pack of Marlboro Reds. I shook one out and looked for the lighter and ashtray.

  “There isn’t one,” Alex said.

  I glanced over at her.

  “An ashtray,” she continued. “Cars don’t come with them anymore—hardly ever, anyway.”

  My mouth fell open. “So, what do people do with their cigarettes?”

  “May want to brace yourself for this one too,” Alex said. “Smoking is a bit of a taboo now. You can’t smoke in restaurants or offices, pretty much any public building. Cigarettes gave lots of people cancer, so a big push came through to make everyone want to quit. You would not believe what they charge per pack now.”