The Urban Fantasy Anthology Part 41

I'm the real Coldtown.

You still want in?

Talking Back to the Moon.

Steven R. Boyett.

Out of the Santa Monica Mountains they walked south through the San Fernando Valley on the broken thoroughfare of I-5, threading their way among corroded cars and shattered pavement. Worn-down houses and burned-down condos and broken-fronted convenience stores to either side. The shorthaired girl sunbrowned and thin in baggy cargo shorts with bulging pockets, nylon backpack with toy figures dangling from the zipper pulls and a bedroll tied beneath. A worn and faded black babydoll tee s.h.i.+rt with a glittery rabbit iron-on gone dull in strips where the outer coating had peeled. Sheathed bowie knife half the length of her arm hanging from her cabled belt. Bright yellow wraparound sungla.s.ses. Multicolored Adidas walking shoes and mismatched socks. A different color of nail polish flaking on each ragged nail. The centaur huge and gaunt beside her like a stick-figure drawing of a mythical centaur. Dark and angular and alert. Tapered head not much wider than the muscular stalk of neck. The mouth a line sawn into the dark face like a healing scar from ear to hard triangular ear. Javelin in extra-jointed hand and pannier occasionally clinking with the gait of his odd tricornered feet. Not hooves and not paws but something in between, as if some reptile had evolved to something equine.

The girl pulled a roadmap gone furry at the folds from its backpack pocket and turned her back to the wind and leafed through it without unfolding it. She looked south as if to match what she saw to what her map depicted.

Do cities all look the same to you? she said. I mean not the same, but like any one place you are, you can't tell where you are cause it looks like all the other places.

Don unnastan.

Yeah, okay. She folded the map and returned it to its backpack pocket and they resumed walking. Santa Ana winds sent ripples through the freeway gra.s.s.

She sat up in her sleeping bag. The faceless dark above her. The bowie handle in her hand. She hadn't been aware of reaching for it.

Chay stood watch near the vinecovered overpa.s.s support. They'd lit no fire and would not while they were in the Valley. Bottled water mixed into an MRE pouch was good enough for now.

She drank flat soda water and got out of her sleeping bag and went to pee. She came back and stood silent near Chay unmoving as some roadside sculpture. She set a hand against the centaur's flank. The pebbled hide warm. Neither of them spoke here where the underpa.s.s would echo and a normal voice could carry a quarter mile. The moon already set and concrete ghostly in the starlight. Nightsounds in the darkened world. Derelict cars on the freeway like foundered boats rotting on some bedroughted reef.

She moved her hand to her chest and closed her eyes. No moon out to call forth her former wildness. Was it there to answer, any part of it? Could it be restored? This is why we're heading south.

Next day Avy called lunch in Sunland and stood looking over the freeway railing at some old overgrown and half-collapsed warehouse district and ate rehydrated mac and cheese. Chay had killed a racc.o.o.n with a rock and as he dressed it with a filleting knife he asked her what it had felt like when she changed.

You'd get hungry as s.h.i.+t a couple days before, she said. Dad said it burned unbelievable calories when you turned.

Calree?

Like wood your body burns to keep it going. He said just changing could starve you to death if you didn't eat enough before. We used to have to stock up like crazy every month. And then after you changed you were starving again. I don't really remember much about what it was like after I changed or what I did or anything. It's like trying to remember when you were a baby or something. Like the parts of your brain that do the thinking and remembering aren't there any more. The human parts. But I remember being really hungry. Half our runs were looking for food.

Runs.

That's what we called it, because we'd just run and run. All over the hills up around where we were living. I remember it felt really good. Like this is what I'm made for. I can sort of remember stuff like that. Feelings. We'd hunt. Coyotes would run from us. Wolves would howl. We were like them but we weren't like them at all. They didn't know what to make of us. And the nights were bright because the moon was always full when we changed. And the moon was- She stopped. Looking off the freeway into some invisible distance.

It was like you could hear it. Like the light made some kind of sound. The second it came up you knew it was there. You didn't have to see it. It didn't matter where you were. And it wasn't hearing really because it happened in your head. Like you felt it. The color and the light and the sound and the weight and it all just pulled at you. I really miss it.

The centaur swallowed the racc.o.o.n and the girl swabbed out her cup and tied her backpack and hoisted it. Come on, she said.

Late that afternoon they pa.s.sed the Ventura Freeway connector and the 5 turned due south to parallel the sludge of the concrete-banked and -bedded Los Angeles River. Great berms of garbage and rusted frames of shopping carts half submerged in a kind of narrow bog. Miles of concrete embankment painted over with spraycans or brushes or rollers in a dense scrawl of pictoglyphs as if some dying race had struggled to reclaim the act of writing itself in order to set down some paltry hurried record that in all its myriad manifestations along this declining borderline of corralled waterway said entirely, I was here. We were here.

Downtown was a dozen miles away by the map. Full night would fall before they got there and there was no way in h.e.l.l she was going into any downtown in the dark. They were pa.s.sing the eastern end of the Hollywood Hills and all about their right side lay the wilded ma.s.s of what had once been Griffith Park. What remained of the Los Angeles Zoo just off the freeway somewhere in that thicket. The wasted sprawl of Glendale to their left.

They were in the shadow of the hills and dark would be upon them soon. She told Chay they should make camp soon and he said okay. Half a mile past the Colorado Boulevard exit they set up as they had the night before. Around them a stakebed truck with the wooden stakes collapsed, a phone company van with ladders on the roof, a FedEx tractor trailer, a rusteaten yellow schoolbus with steps caked and filthy past the foldback door aslant in its frame. Half the windowgla.s.s stove in. She did not look inside but instead folded down the back seat of a Scion and swept out the dirt and cobwebs and dead leaves with the edge of her hand and then unrolled her bedding there.

She ate her MRE directly from the foil pouch and cold. Chay taught her several words for things and tested her by saying them at random times and making her point to what they represented. She was wrong often as not. The guttural and phlegmy speech all but indistinguishable to her, one belch from the other. But Chay seemed to approve.

He left for his evening ritual while she ate her tasteless thirty-year-old cookie and downed it with bottled water. She thought about downtown and what might be there. She drew her bowie knife and practiced with it. A beautiful weapon for someone two feet taller than her. The handle banded with ebony, leather, and bra.s.s, bra.s.s-ended and with a curled bra.s.s fingerguard. The grip large in one hand and small in both. The blade itself looked a small companion to a cutla.s.s, broad with a large and upswept cutting fore and curved cutback in the lead third. Both edges shaving sharp. Bloodlet on both sides alongside the thicker keel. The metal spotless and no rust anywhere. A deep cutaway blade trap just before the guard. The whole thing nearly a foot and a half long and heavy enough to tire her arm with wielding. You could hack off a branch with it, or an arm. The cutback gave authority to a backslash and made stabbing more effective. She loved the bowie even though it really was a lot of knife for her.

She sheathed the knife and gathered the empty MRE packets and carried them to a car a hundred yards away and threw them in. On the way back she walked slowly by the schoolbus and eyed it warily. The square blind windows necklaced in gla.s.s chunks. The cha.s.sis lowered on dryrotted tires. A faint urine stench as she pa.s.sed downwind. The whole interior probably some ma.s.sive rodent den.

The shadow of the hills stretched well across the Valley now. The breeze grew chill and she changed to her much-worn flannel hoodie. As dark came on, strange cries rose from the enjungled hillside. Shrieks and squawks and chittering. Sobbing peac.o.c.ks and enraged macaws. Chittering monkeys and obscene toads. Once a roar and a trumpeted reply. In the hills coyotes barked accompaniment. Soon the whole was riotous and strange, a great odd menagerie settling in for the night. She was accustomed to odd animal noises and had slept outside nearly half her life yet she had never heard anything like it. She had no qualms concerning creatures out there hunting creatures. Often she'd been one of them. But some of these creatures sounded large and the sounds were mysterious and a little worrisome.

She turned to fetch more water from the pack she'd left in the lowered tailgate of the Scion and she stopped. A hyena stood watching her from the roof of that very car. Spotted like a leopard and built like a madman's nightmare of a dog, it appraised her steadily. Rear legs short and front long and all blackfooted. Close-set eyes and wide muzzle black.

She stared back only long enough to be sure it was not about to leap and then looked around for the others. It would call them soon and they would flank her. She saw nothing but continued to look because she would soon need shelter or a place where she could fight. She had broken her lifelong habit of noting what fully windowed cars or other protected s.p.a.ces were at hand wherever she made camp and now here she stood and there stood the smartest and most remorseless predator she had seen aside from human being or centaur and more on the way. She had seen them bite through leg bones and they were better strategists than most people knew.

The decoy on the Scion roof was bristling at the mane now. Her head went low to just before her paws and she grinned down at the girl. Nothing but ten feet of air between those teeth and her.

Avy unsnapped the sheath strap and drew the bowie and grinned back and sang out a long fuuuck you. Then she glanced around once more and threw her head back and yelled Chay's name as loud as she could.

The hyena grunted softly several times and then began to whoop. Highpitched and upbending. Avy grabbed the bowie in two hands and felt herself relax. The wolf in her was gone but mind and body remembered.

She realized that she already knew where they'd be coming from and she turned toward the schoolbus and yelled Chay's name again as the clan leapt from the doorway one at a time. One looked out a broken window at her and lifted its nose to the air and withdrew and emerged in its turn a moment later. Now a dozen of them paced the road in strange half-upright postures, eyes on her and heads swiveling on long thick necks to stay in place as if on gimbals as their slopebacked bodies turned and turned impatiently. Each a match for her weight and probably her knife.

She yelled out again and this seemed to incite them. A group of three came toward her and another group of three moved to circle round behind her. Loping in their peculiar bearish gait and batlike faces stern. Grunting as if exasperated. The remaining six stayed where they were. These would rush to help if the others could not bring her down or they would rush to feed if she did fall. The two groups approaching would pause just long enough to take her measure and then come at her singly from either side, the first in front to busy her and the other behind to hamstring her. She had seen a group of less than this coordinate to bring down an armed man twice her weight and gut him with their teeth even as he grabbed at them and kicked and beat and looked on in flateyed voiceless terror. Unable even to scream because fascia and diaphragm had been torn through and bloodsoaked muzzles already worried at his guts.

The telephone company van was nearby and she sidled to it and stood with her back to it. The decoy on the Scion roof was puffed up now and whooping pure hilarity. The s.h.a.g of her dun mane all on end. Avy kept her gaze fixed at a point between the two approaching groups and s.h.i.+fted her knife to her left hand and groped behind her with her right until she found the side door latch. She pulled and felt it disengage but nothing happened and she pulled harder and it moved but grudgingly. The rusted cha.s.sis becoming all of a piece. The flanking groups stopped ten feet away all of them whooping and appraising her and she knew she had only seconds before the first came at her. The door shrieked in its track and yielded a foot of entry that was all she needed. She kept the knifepoint to the fore and turned sideways and ducked into the van and hit the back of her head on the top of the frame hard enough to see pinp.r.i.c.k explosions of light just as the first of them ran at her. She pulled the knife in after her and then pushed it out again as the hyena leapt to follow her in, and the hunter's jaws clamped on the blade entire. Their very force opening him up palate and tongue. The impact drove her back into the crowded van heaped with corroded gear. The upturned bowie point still lodged in the hyena's palate and the lower jaw snapping at the edge. Black eyes bright and fevered to get at her. The front paws scrabbled and she braced a hand behind her and pushed her upper body forward and then pushed the blade again. The creature laughed maniacally and tried to backpedal and she let it. The second attacker crowding the doorway now to snap beside the injured creature's bleeding snout. She jerked the handle left then right and the impaled head followed and she yanked back and the fingerguard caught the thick and bloodsoaked fangs to pull the animal toward her. She almost lost the knife in its head. She twisted the other way and pulled back and kicked out and the hyena backed out of the van. The second attacker snapped at her in the doorway now almost on top of the first and she rolled sideways and grabbed the door and slammed it against the fangbared muzzle and it laughed as had its partner. The muzzle withdrew and she shut the door completely and backed into the crowded van and looked around at where she'd make her stand. The sides arranged with arcane devices in decline on racks and stacked bins of cable and connector. Nowhere to go and nowhere to fight but also no room for their lethal teamwork. She s.h.i.+fted the knife to the other hand and wiped her palm against her pants and s.h.i.+fted the knife back as the next one leapt up on the snub hood and pulled itself up and looked at her in a kind of ludicrous surprise. It turned its head and whooped. She threw the nearest thing at hand, some metal box with dials, and it hit but all the animal did was flinch and then keep coming. A second leapt to knock gla.s.s chunks from the bottom of the winds.h.i.+eld frame with its front paws and then leapt again to hook its paws on the cleared frame and haul itself in.

One at a time she had a chance but not if she waited. The first was between the bucket seats now and coming back and she swung another metal box by two feet of power cable and clouted the hyena on the muzzle and followed with a slash of the bowie that garroted the thing so fully that its head half peeled from its neck. Blood engulfed her knife hand and sprayed a bright graffiti on the close walls. The body fell kicking. The other already behind it and not even pausing to examine its fallen partner. She backslashed and nearly lost the heavy knife again for the warm blood covering her hand and again she swung the box on its cord but the swing had nothing behind it and the hit meant nothing. The teeth popped so close to her wrist she felt the wind of it. It was on her before she could swing again and her hands came up to ward the head and met its throat as it knocked her back amid the gear. Its hind legs scrabbling to drive itself into her and front paws digging at her chest for purchase enough to open her up. Her right hand gripped matted fur with the bowie handle pressed between and the blade flat against the neck and she could feel its breath rasp through its windpipe against her fingers and she smelled rank dead meat breath as it snapped above her straining to nod down toward her and she thought about the flat beseeching look in the eyes of the man she'd seen killed by this creature's kin and she yelled and let go the fur in her right hand to grip the knife as she pushed with the left and turned the edge toward the throat and brought the handle toward herself so hard the bra.s.s cap hit her just under the ribs and knocked the wind from her. The claws against her had no will behind them now and the shrill laugh had liquid in it and she was blinded by a gout of blood in one eye before her hands slipped in the blood now jetting from its severed jugular and windpipe. It fell whole atop her snapping still and gurgling. She cradled it like a crib toy until the legs stopped kicking and the teeth stopped popping beside her bloodsoaked face and then she shoved it boneless off and tried to stand and could not breathe.

Already another hung in the pa.s.senger window like some spectator that had wagered on the outcome. Avy wiped her hands and wiped her face but this only spread the blood around. A heavy smell of s.h.i.+t and iron in the van now. She tried to yell at her next combatant but the breath for it would not come. Sparkling black edged her vision. Not now. f.u.c.k you. Not now.

She grabbed the gear rack with her free hand to hold herself up and stepped between the two dead hyenas and brought her knife toward the third at the window. Its claws sc.r.a.ped metal as it hoisted itself up. Blood flung from her hand as she beckoned it with the blade. Come on. It was halfway in the window like some horror being born into the van and she grabbed the bowie in both hands and crouched and then the hyena's head exploded. It dropped to drape across the windowframe like an empty duffel and the near eye hung down by the stalk against its muzzle like a grape on a vine.

At first she did not understand what she had seen and stood there waiting still to meet it. She heard loud trumpeting and wondered what other animal had come to join the fray and then knew what animal it was. The clan's calls changed from whoops to frenzied highpitched laughter and she stumbled forward past the bodies still warm at her feet, holding herself up with left hand braced against the rough and flaking wall. She readied the knife and leaned forward to look out the window and past the rock-killed body still kicking at the doorpanel as if caught in some primal dream of hunting. As perhaps it was. She sank to her knees with the breath still not coming. The window a yard away and beyond reach. She put a hand to her chest and realized some of the blood on her was hers. The hysterical cries intensified and she heard several thuds and then something in her gut unclenched and she drew a great long wheezing breath and fell backward into the van. Head pillowed upon the first of her slain predators.

Of course Chay had a first aid kit. Injuries among his kind were no different in nature or in treatment than injuries among her own.

He found her gear and moved her half a mile down the road and set her on a car roof where he could see her while he scouted the vicinity. He found a plastic gascan on a jeep with an inch of gas still in it and he used it and her mag bar to set a convertible ablaze by way of campfire and worklight. He set her upwind of it on her foam sleeping pad on the trunk of a car. She watched with odd dissociation as he bent to her and cut her shredded flannel hoodie from collar to hem with her Gerber knife. The fabric soaked through with her blood and her a.s.sailants' blood and already stiffening. He laid aside the parted halves and c.o.c.ked his head and studied her. She looked scourged by a thin switch. Two narrow sets of three cuts each and many scratches ran from the inner swell of each small breast and between her ribs, down to midstomach. If she'd held the hyena two inches lower he'd have gutted her sure.

I never let anyone get this far with me, she said.

Don unnastan.

Nothing. Sorry. She turned her head and wondered if she would be sick. Her forehead felt hot. What's your word for ouch?

Chay opened a waterbottle and soaked a handtowel and started was.h.i.+ng blood off her chest but pulled his hand back when she hissed.

Little softer please?

Yeh.

He swabbed more gently and then pulled back out of his own shadow and studied her wounds by firelight. Deepset eyes enshadowed and unreadable.

She leaned her head up to look even though it hurt.

It didn't feel that bad when it happened, she said.

Not tok, hokay?

Okay. Sorry. She let her head fall back. A shooting star segmented by his silhouette. The menagerie calls in the thick-growth hills subdued but still there. What's your word for sorry?

Don haff one. Affy quiet now.

He bent to the plastic tackle box repurposed as his first aid kit and came up with a gla.s.s pint flask of Stolichnaya half-full. He opened it and held her up with one hand across her shoulder blades and she felt the cuts bleeding again. He put the bottle in her hand. Drink, he said. One, two drink, yeh? He made two comical gunk-gunk swallows.

She sipped and then immediately coughed and tried to sit up and regretted that because it hurt like h.e.l.l. Jesus effin, she said.

Affy drink.

Yeah yeah, okay. She pinched her nose and drank and took a breath and s.h.i.+vered and drank again. Oh man. People do this for fun?

Not jus yooman.

He set out gauze rolls and number four gauze pads in plastic packets and surgical tape and shortbladed scissors. He touched the bruise beneath her ribs already turning ugly and he c.o.c.ked his head.

I hit myself with my f.u.c.king knife, she said. She laughed. You should see the other guy.

Affy cold?

Naw. Affy fine, dude.

He made sure her bowie knife was out of her reach and then he pointed to her right. She turned her head to look and he upended the bottle of Stoli on her wounds. Her yell would have put out a campfire. The surrounding nightsounds stopped altogether. She bucked and he held her down and then wiped away the b.l.o.o.d.y vodka with a new clean rag and then he dabbed the wounds and let them dry. He taped the edges of the gauze pads and aligned them on the open cuts and pressed down gently and then lifted her to wrap her chest in bands of gauze. He taped that off and stood looking down at her. She was breathing hard but made no other sound. He lowered her back down. The arboreal racket seeped back into the night.

He looked through her backpack and found her tee s.h.i.+rt but no other. He eased her up again and removed the cut and bloodsoaked flannel hoodie smelling of vodka and made her raise her arms and tried to put the tee s.h.i.+rt over them but had never done such a thing and could not sort it out. She leaned her weight back against his outspread hand and put the s.h.i.+rt on herself and he laid her back down. She asked if she could have another swallow and he gave her the bottle. She swigged and held it out to him. He capped it and put it away.

Make beddah?

f.u.c.k no. Make not give a s.h.i.+t.

He draped her sleeping bag across her. The burning car already guttering. The night windy but not cool.

I'm sorry about your spear.

The centaur shrugged. Jus piece a pipe, yeh? Make anudduh one t'morrah.

She squinted. I'm G.o.dd.a.m.ned if I understand you.

Sokay. Affy res now.

Okay.

The centaur cleaned her bowie knife and oiled his sharpening stone with a small metal bottle of 3-in-One oil and sharpened the knife, pus.h.i.+ng the angled edge across the stone in sure deft strokes, one just like the other. He wiped the blade again and cleaned the slurry from the stone and put the stone away. He held the blade up and turned it before him. A big knife even in his own big hand. He returned it to its sheath and set it beside the girl. She was breathing evenly. He watched her a moment and then turned away.

I'm looking for my mom and dad, she said.

Affy leef dem?

She did not reply and he began repacking his first aid kit.

I think they left me, she said. I think I mighta seen em die.

He shut the plastic tacklebox and returned it to his pannier and began sorting this night's finds on his Shroud of Turin beach towel.

I need to find out. Alive or dead I need to know.

Know is beddah yeh.

Yeah.

Chay hep find. Now Affy res. Drink wadder too. Don be sick t'morrah.

Okey dokey.

He finished up his sorting and threw away half of it and threw out some of his previous kit to replace with the new and repacked the panniers and set them aside. He opened a bottled water and squeezed it into his gaping mouth.

I think you killed em, she said. Your people I mean. I think I saw it.

He threw the bloodsoaked handtowels and her shredded flannel and the waterbottle on the carfire. The fabrics flared pale blue and haloed and then began to smoke and pop as the waterbottle blackened and shriveled like some prehistoric insect carapace.

Only fair I guess. G.o.d knows I killed my share. Maybe someone's kid saw me, huh.

He looked at her. She lay on her back with her eyes closed. The sheathed bowie alongside. The waning firelight upon her.

Mebbe, he said.

That Avy's dead now though. I guess tha.s.s good but it don't feel good.

She let out a long breath.

Don't understand why you don't wanna kill me like all the others do.

The centaur watched her breathing lengthen and he took up his watch and said no more. After he was sure she was asleep he opened up the two English phrasebooks she had given him and began to read them in the waning light.

Trumpeting awoke her and her first thought was that Chay had made another musical javelin and was trying it out. She sat up and then hissed between her teeth and put her hand to her chest and felt the bandages beneath her s.h.i.+rt. She remembered all of it at once and could not believe she was not dead.

She braced a hand behind her and glared back at the day and shaded her eyes. The morning well advanced. Chay stood in the back of the stakebed truck with forelegs on the cab and looked down at something off the freeway.

She pulled out the neck of her s.h.i.+rt and looked down at herself. She let go the collar and lay back and thought about throwing up. h.e.l.l with that. She stood and staggered backward and leaned against the car she'd slept beside. She breathed deep and waited for the pinp.r.i.c.k blackness to subside. Let's try that again. She straightened from the car and stood a moment and then took an experimental step. It didn't kill her so she took another one. She retrieved her bowie from beside the sleeping bag and took off her belt and put it on again with the knife at her hip. She walked around the charred remains of the convertible. Chay was watching her now but did not move to help her. She nodded at him and he beckoned her on. When she got to the stakebed he pointed off at whatever he was looking at and she started to climb up but when she put a hand on the open tailgate and lifted her leg she felt her cuts grow tight in their bandages.