The Nine Read online

  She stared at me for a minute. I cooed and pretended to tap my imaginary baby on the nose with my finger. “You’re a good poop sample aren’t you—yes you are ...”

  This was enough to draw out a laugh. Alex sighed and almost handed me the vial, then someone at the other end of the cavernous hall caught her attention.

  “Alex.” A mousey looking young girl bounded toward us. Alex’s smile became broader and warmer than I had thought was possible.

  I ground my teeth and cursed under my breath.

  “I’m glad I found you.” Mousey girl came to a stop, a little breathless and looking less than together. She carried a disheveled stack of papers and envelopes that rivaled the state of her hair, glasses, and clothing. More bureaucratic paperwork. I was beginning to believe red tape made up the foundation upon which all things were made.

  “Sabnack wants to see you right away.”

  Alex lost a little of her smile, but she still beamed at the girl standing next to her. “Figures. I’ll head over in a minute.”

  “I don’t know. He acted pretty anxious.” Mousy girl smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Remember what happened last time you didn’t hop to? He’s probably still washing that coffee out of his luxurious mane.”

  The two of them broke out in laughter, and I began to feel like the salad at an all dessert buffet.

  Their laughter died down, and they both seemed to notice me standing there at the same time.

  “So, is this him?” Mousy girl winked at me. “He’s cute.”

  Alex laughed. “If you go for that sort of thing, I guess. Give him a shot if you want to.”

  “No. He looks too sweet. I would use him up and break his heart.” Mousy girl pushed her glasses up on her nose and tried to push the hair out of her face, but the unruly strands fell right back down.

  “You know I can hear you right?” I said. “I’m standing right here.”

  Mousy Girl looked back to Alex. “Not too smart though. I like that.”

  Alex laughed again, and Mousy Girl turned to leave. “Don’t forget about Sabnack, Alex. He is waiting for you.” She threw up a hand and waved back over her shoulder without looking back. “Nice to meet you, cute boy. Watch your back. Alex bites, and I mean it.”

  “She’s interesting.” I raised an eyebrow.

  “You have no idea.” The smile on Alex’s lips faded, but it still showed in her eyes. “Looks like you get your wish.”

  She held the sample out, and I took the vial, trying not to look too eager.

  “I will protect this with my life. Point me in the right direction, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Turn here and head straight. You can’t miss it.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Seriously. You didn’t even trust me to take this around the corner?”

  Alex wiggled her finger in front of her face. “They’re made of butter, remember? Just try to get it there in one piece.”

  I felt Alex’s eyes on me the whole way. When I got to the corner, I looked back. Sure enough, Alex still stood with her arms crossed looking like a tattooed supermodel hall monitor. I held up the vial to show her it was still safe before I disappeared out of sight.

  My mouth still hung open in a toothy grin when my face hit Sabnack’s hairy chest. It felt like hitting a brick wall upholstered in smelly fur and armor. My bared teeth found fur, not leather. All the floss in the world wouldn’t be enough to rid me of that hairy-chested nightmare.

  More importantly, thanks to Sabnack’s locomotive style appearance, the vial I held like a careless child tumbled end over end toward the shattering demise Alex predicted moments ago.

  Without thinking, I spun around Sabnack, ducked, and launched myself under his grasp. My face slapped the bottom of his dusky wings as I sailed past, reaching out just in time to snatch the vial before it hit the floor.

  My ribs paid the price though. I hit the dark marble hard, stretched out and on my side. Too bad getting hurt down here didn’t work the same way as getting hurt Topside. My ribs bent and shifted in ways they were never meant to when I hit the floor, but I didn’t hear anything break. The pain receptors in my chest disagreed.

  I groaned and rolled onto my back in time to see Alex appear under the canopy of Sabnack’s outstretched wings. The expression on the Hellion’s face was unreadable, but the purple/red shade of Alex’s face told me all I needed to know.

  “You had to travel twenty feet, and you couldn’t even do that.”

  I held up the vial in triumph but didn’t pull myself off the floor. “Saved it!” I did my best to swallow my internal organs.

  Alex reached out and snatched the vial out of my hand.

  I reciprocated by backhanding a bare section of her calf where a frayed hole in her jeans showed a tattoo of a chainsaw-juggling clown. I guess impulse control might need to go on the old to do list.

  Alex turned back and put her boot in the middle of my chest, leaning in until my ribs sounded all new alarms of pain. “Do you have something you want to say to me?”

  “Yes.” I groaned, feeling like my head might pop.

  Alex leaned in lower, “Well, go on. I’m listening.”

  I took in about a teaspoon of air and managed to bellow out, “You’re welcome.”

  Sabnack straightened, and his lips twisted into a grin that showed his huge canines.

  Alex huffed and pushed away, allowing me to take a breath.

  “I assume this is the sample I sent you to retrieve?” Sabnack held a hand out to Alex.

  Alex nodded and set the vial into Sabnack’s hand. All hope drained away with my dignity.

  “Good,” Sabnack said. “I’m glad the two of you are getting along. I received word that your assignment together is permanent.”

  “Oh good,” I said. “That penny I threw into the wishing well did the trick.”

  Alex barely managed to keep her composure. “Will there be anything else today?”

  “No,” Sabnack shook his head, and his mane swayed in smooth black waves. “I will make sure this gets to the lab. You can help your new partner off the floor and take off for the night.

  Alex looked down at me. I put a hand out, wiggling my fingers with mock impatience.

  Alex spun and walked away. Sabnack let out a huff that sounded like a laugh, then he snapped his wings and moved on in the opposite direction.

  “So, I guess I’ll just get up on my own then.” I raised my voice and waved the hand I still held in the air. “That’s okay. I don’t need any help.”

  I pulled myself off the floor with a groan and reached into my pocket to pull out the second vial. Cradling my ribs in one hand and holding the second vial in the other, I felt small standing in the gigantic hall alone. I had to get to Judas’s office before he left for the day—if he left for the day—and tell him what happened. There was still a fifty percent chance they had right stuff. Too bad Judas didn’t seem like a glass half full kind of guy.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So, you retrieved two samples.” Judas stroked his rough and wild beard, staring me down as he leaned on the obsidian quarry he called a desk.

  I nodded like a kid claiming he lost his mom when he got caught peeking into the ladies dressing room. “I thought you might want something to test—so you would know what they were up to.”

  Judas nodded back still stroking his beard. “And you thought offering them a sample to test would be a good idea as well.”

  I nodded again, gripping the arms of my bone chair, trying not to look like I was ready to run out of the room screaming like the victim of an atomic wedgie. Judas took the news with calm reservation. So calm that it made the skin on my neck want to crawl over my scalp and say hello to my forehead. I almost wished he would yell, stomp, and scream. Even his crazy bird-lady-sex-demon, Mastema, still eyeing me from behind her blindfold in the corner, would be better than having Judas loom over me, smoothing his beard in slow, considerate strokes.

  “At what point did you decide it would be pru
dent to mix the samples and give them one without knowing which was the decoy?” Judas began to raise his voice. “In the cave, when you were collecting a sample you should have never retrieved in the first place? Or was it when you handed the sample over to your partner a few moments later?” Judas stopped preening his facial hair, balled his fist, and drove it into the stony top of his desk. The impact made the floor shudder beneath my feet. I was wrong. This was much worse than the beard smoothing thing.

  “Perhaps the idea came to you when you had a second chance to compare the samples but decided to bobble the opportunity to smash it on the ground instead. Thank goodness you prevented the sample from being damaged there. What a tragedy it would have been if the sample were destroyed. What would the lab have done if they had nothing to test?”

  I shrank into my chair, realizing I had screwed up yet another chance to fix my colossal string of poor decisions.

  Judas gripped the edge of his desk and leaned toward me, looking like his eyeballs and every vein in his forehead were about to explode.

  “Well?” he barked.

  The noise made me want to vault over the back of my chair. “Oh—you want me to answer? I uh. Not the last one ... I mean never ... None of the—examples, times you were saying ...”

  Judas shot to his feet, and I braced for ... I wasn’t really sure what, but it had to be horrible. Judas turned to the side instead, snatched the sample tube off the desk, and handed the ampule to Procel. He still looked relaxed in his usual corner at the rear of the room. “We may as well test this, since our new agent brought enough back for everyone to play with. Maybe he got lucky and gave them the benign sample.”

  Procel dipped his head, then his gaze shot toward me. His expression was one of concern, almost warning. The look didn’t fit the fiery-eyed albino demon, but it was there and gone, then he made his silent retreat out the rear door.

  Judas spun back to me, and his stare pinned me to my seat like a physical presence. “Next time you set out to impede an operation, your best course of action would be to avoid bringing any trace of a suspicious and potentially deadly contagion back with you.” Judas folded his fingers and made a visible effort to calm his voice. The veins in his head still looked like over-pressured garden hoses. “Perhaps a better course of action might be to retrieve a benign sample or fail to bring anything at all. I hope this is a lesson we might all learn from and avoid in the future.”

  I nodded with an enthusiastic vigor of a bobblehead riding a dirt bike.

  “Good.” Judas wrung his hands together and paced toward the door. He opened it, and I shot up out of my chair, sensing an escape.

  “Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Gantry. Let us hope, for all our sakes, that your next visit brings better news.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I slogged through the maze of high-rise shanties in Scrapyard City, surprised at how many had been rebuilt. Firestorms were always a catalyst for new construction in my neighborhood. Abandoned homesteads due to the death tolls and countless collapsed buildings meant a free-for-all on building materials. Survivors improved what they had or started over if they had nothing. Everyone fell to a storm sooner or later. It was inevitable. I’d survived longer than most, but even I had taken my turn beating back the fire only to find myself consumed by the flames.

  I thought my firestorm dodging days at the shop might be over, but Judas confirmed the fact that not all new recruits rated their own dorm or apartment in the Factory ... err Agency. He said getting me a place would only raise suspicion, so I should work on earning it for myself. Seemed like a half-truth was as close as Judas ever got to the real truth. Agents get a place to live, but only if you earn it first. You will be assigned a partner to work with and show you the ropes, but she will be a psychopath control freak who has a penchant for working alone. Joining the Agency under Judas was like winning a twenty-four-hour shopping spree and then getting dropped off in the middle of the Sahara Desert with a canteen and a pair of sneakers—all you had to do was make it to the store.

  I scrambled over a large pile of crumbled beams, sheet metal, and old piping in the road and found myself face to face with a Woebegone brandishing a makeshift knife made out of some of the same scrap treasure I stood on. The man towered over me and appeared about as crazy and desperate as a cat trapped in the spin cycle of a washing machine. His rag tag outfit hung from his arms, legs, and torso, exposing strips of blistered, bloody burns. The acrid stench of burnt flesh and over-ripe sweat wafted off his body. The smell alone drove me back several steps.

  “Mine.” Mr. Smelly’s voice came out high and squeaky, not at all matching his Hulk-like demeanor. The duality caught me so off guard I choked out a laugh. He wiped the grin off my face when he swiped his knife at my midsection. I should have insisted on accommodations at the Agency, at least for the night. There was a reason Woebegone would kill for a job at that place.

  Mr. Smelly’s swing didn’t come close, but he made me flinch. I put my hands up and tried to peer past the rags he’d wrapped around his face to ward off the cold. I didn’t recognize him. A new guy who didn’t understand all the rags in the world wouldn’t make him any warmer. Even with my shop in the area, it was a fair bet he didn’t recognize me either.

  “I don’t want any of your stuff.” I sidestepped, giving him a wide a berth. “I’m trying to make my way home. That’s all.”

  “Mine.” Mr. Smelly was more insistent this time. Move on or become a permanent part of his collection.

  He took another couple of swipes at me, much closer this time, forcing me to jump out of the way.

  “Knock it off.” I tried to sound loud and intimidating, but my voice cracked, and I backed away a little too quick. “I told you I don’t want any of your crap. You see I’m leaving, right?” I held my hands out and kept walking, but I didn’t turn my back on him. Mr. Smelly responded in kind by sticking near his treasure trove. I didn’t want any trouble, but this was The Nine. This place was the very definition of trouble.

  I walked backward until I went around a corner and Mr. Smelly passed out of sight, then I spun on my heels and ran. I made a mental note to carry my Knuckle Stunner when I huffed it back and forth to work from now on. At least walking might get me in better shape. Half a block and I already wheezed like a doggie chew-toy.

  I lumbered through a few more turns, passing several shifty-eyed squatters, and I loped around a curve until I recognized a familiar area of my neighborhood. The high-rise shanty that housed my shop had been beheaded by the storm, but most of the body was still there, due in part to many years of reinforcement by yours truly. The place looked like you could contract tetanus by sneezing at it, but that shop was home sweet home.

  I wasn’t all that shocked to see the shop was still there, but I was surprised to find the place open. Stray leaned out the front window, chatting with one of my better customers, Jonny. A particularly successful snoop when it came to sniffing out information.

  I watched Stray pass something to him and realized she just made some sort of deal. I couldn’t decide whether to be enraged, shocked, betrayed—or all of the above. To make things worse, I was pretty sure he scored my last two cans of Dr. Pepper. Jonny turned and walked away, pocketing his stash while I headed for Stray and my shop. I only made it a few steps before I tripped over a balding Woebegone crouched beneath a pile of ragged blankets. We went over in a tumble, and my ribs reminded me about the little party they had had with the floor a few hours earlier. I winced and rolled to get to my feet. The other man did the same. He was squat and fat, dark-skinned with a ridiculous three-strand comb-over.

  He sprung to his feet faster than I did, but he didn’t bother to help me up.

  “Sorry, man. Sorry.” He waved his hand at me as he backed away.

  “It’s all right. No harm done.” I lied, thinking about my aching ribs. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The Woebegone pulled his blankets over his head and clasped them below his nose as if he didn’t
want me to see what he looked like. “I was just resting. I’ll get outta here. Sorry.”

  Blanket-man turned tail and ran like mugger making a getaway. The crazies were definitely out today.

  I headed for the shop again, checking for any more human speed bumps along the way.

  Stray saw me coming and waved, looking a little friendlier than the last time I’d seen her. Of course, I had to knock her unconscious in the middle of a firestorm and drag her into my shop where a lunatic had tried to beat down our door. That could make anyone a little cranky.

  She walked out and met me in front. She seemed so happy I had a difficult time being angry.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “I told you to hide out inside, not open the place up. And what did you give away to Jonny?”

  Stray held her hands out and stared up at me, a grin so wide it hardly seemed containable. “Just hear me out for a second. After you left, the storm died down. I wanted to find out if anything had been damaged. I thought it might be nice to fix the place up before you got back. While I checked things out, someone came by and said he had information you were waiting for.”

  I groaned again, rolling my head around in a tortured circle.

  “No, no ... it’s alright.” She put her hands on my arms, still looking up at me with those innocent blue eyes. I wanted to ... I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Yell, scold, throw my arms in the air, or flop down like a fed-up toddler. Instead I pressed my lips together and bit down on my tongue.

  “He said you offered him half a dozen Twinkies for the information.”

  Another pained groan.

  Stray rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry. My memories might be gone, but I’m not stupid. I talked to him, and after a while he admitted you really offered him two. He apologized and said he would take one since he’d lied. He also told me more about the—situation you inquired about. I think I’m good at this. I don’t think I’ve ever been this good at anything.”