Bad Moon Rising. Джонатан Мэйберри

stale under him. His nose and ears were no longer bleeding, but the dried blood caked his nostrils and streaked the side of his face. Every once in a while one of his fingers would twitch. That it was his trigger finger was not coincidental and spoke of the dreams that burned in his mind as he slept off the effects of Griswold’s rage.

      Ruger was only out for a few minutes. He was wired differently now, his nerves and synapses firing on different fuel. When he came awake it was like the flick of a switch, with full awareness returning in a crystalline rush of clarity. He knew who he was, where he was, and why he had been smashed flat. He felt the pain was his due, and he wore the invisible stripes of the Man’s lash humbly, honored to be noticed enough even to have been struck down.

      Ruger was on his back when he became aware and he lay there for a moment drinking in the room. He smelled Vic and that made him smile. He was allowed to smile at the pain of others, even at Vic’s pain. The house above was almost silent, but he could hear the clink of ice in a glass and smell the faint juniper tang of Lois’s gin. Even through the smell of Vic’s shit and piss, he could smell that, just as he could smell the woman who sat alone, drinking the day away. He put those thoughts away for later.

      Ruger sat up, crossing his legs and folding them under him so that sitting moved into kneeling. He placed his palms on the floor and closed his dark eyes as he bowed his head to the cool concrete. In the posture of the supplicant he had never been in life, Karl Ruger bowed before the raw, boundless power that was the Man.

      “Forgive,” he begged in a whisper.

      He remained in that posture for hours. All the while the only thing that burned as intensely within him as his need for forgiveness was his aching, burning desire to feed. Night had fallen heavily over Pine Deep. Ruger could feel it, a silky wet darkness that was alive with predator and prey. His body was on fire to run into the shadows, to melt with them, seeking the human heat in the dark cold of October, but he would not move, would not even budge. Even when he heard Vic get up, cursing and groggy, weeping with pain and humiliation as he staggered to the cellar steps and climbed unsteadily up to get cleaned up—even then Ruger remained bowed in supplication as the nothingness screamed in his head.

      Then, like the faintest breath of a cool breeze on scorched skin it came. Not a word, not even a whisper, nothing articulate or shaped. Just the softest, sweetest, most subtle of touches, mind to mind. Kind to kind. After the lash, a caress of forgiveness. And of consent.

      Ruger’s fetid blood screamed for black joy.

      Chapter 11

      (1)

      Weinstock dropped Crow off outside his store and headed home, anxious to be out of the night and behind his own locked doors. Crow watched him go, and in the time it took Weinstock to drive two blocks and make a left the enormity of everything that had happened in the last day and a half suddenly caught up and hit him like a freight train. He staggered backward and leaned against a parking meter as a wave of nausea swirled sickeningly around his head. Gagging, he twisted around to throw up into the gutter but could only manage dry heaves. The corners of his eyes tingled as if little spiders were crawling on his cheekbones and he had to grip the meter to keep from falling into the street.

      Three shoppers gave him disgusted looks as they past, and Crow distinctly heard the word “drunk” from one of them. It made him furious, but that only intensified the nausea. He held onto the meter for dear life.

      Mike looked up as the bell above the door jangled and he saw Crow come in looking dirty and defeated.

      “Crow!” He hurried over, and actually had to support Crow across the floor to the tall chair behind the counter. “What’s wrong?”

      Crow sat on the chair, arms on thighs, head low, breathing like he’d just finished a marathon. “Sorry, kiddo,” he gasped when he could manage it. “Feeling a little out of it. No sleep, no food, bad hospital coffee.”

      “Stay here,” Mike ordered, then went over and locked the front door, came back, and helped Crow into the adjoining apartment and down onto the couch. Crow’s three cats, Pinetop, Muddy Whiskers, and Koko, rushed over but then slowed to a stop when they smelled Crow’s clothes. One by one they sniffed, turned up their noses, and stalked off. Crow, steadier now that he was sitting down, looked at them and then at Mike. “When you stink so bad you offend animals that lick their balls for fun and sniff each other’s asses, then you really are in sorry shape.”

      “Well,” Mike said, “fair’s fair. You smell pretty bad.”

      “Thanks, kid, I knew you’d have my back.” Crow picked up the CD remote and aimed it at the big Nakamichi Home Audio system. He had five disks in the trays, a mix of classic rock and blues. Leadbelly started it off by singing “Bourgeois Blues,” and the disks that followed went from The Ides of March’s “Vehicle” to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to Albert King’s “Born under a Bad Sign,” all of it wrapped up by Big Bill Broonzy singing about “Trouble in Mind.” It was the music he’d listened to before setting out to Dark Hollow with Newton, and he almost turned it off, but didn’t. The music wasn’t any kind of threat. The music was a safe place and even the first few notes of Leadbelly’s rough voice were immensely soothing.

      Mike brought him a bottle of Gatorade and a PowerBar. “Here, these might help until I can get some food delivered.”

      “Thanks, Mike.” He looked at the bottle. “My favorite flavor. Green.”

      Mike sat on the arm of the guest chair. “Do you want to talk about, um, anything? I mean, I heard some stuff on the news, and a lot of customers came in asking about you, and you told me some stuff, but—”

      “Can it wait until I have a shower?”

      “Sure,” Mike said. “You don’t…uh…need help in the bathroom or anything, do you?”

      “No, and let us both give thanks for that.”

      “Amen,” Mike said, and went back into the store.

      (2)

      Vic finished his shower and dressed in fresh clothes, going slowly through the steps of washing, drying, and dressing. His body hurt as if he’d been stomped by ten skinheads wearing Doc Martens. When he pissed his urine stream was tinted red, and when he brushed his teeth he spit as much blood as toothpaste into the sink. He blew his nose carefully to clear away the clots of blood, and used a rag and then Q-tips to clean his ears. His old clothes—stained with shit, piss, and blood—he dumped in a black plastic trash bag he got from the hall closet. He wouldn’t even bother making Lois clean them up. He’d just throw them the hell out. Shoes, too. He wanted to traces, no reminders. Never, not once in his whole life, not since he’d first met Ubel Griswold in 1970, had Vic been punished. The memory of it—what he could remember after the blackout—was so humiliating, so traumatic that all he felt inside was a vast empty sadness.

      He finished buttoning his shirt and then sat down on the edge of the bed, putting his face in his hands, feeling lower than he ever had.

      “What do I have to do to make it up to you?” he whispered. “You tell me, Boss, and I’ll tear down Heaven for you. I’ll burn this whole town to ashes. Anything. You just tell me what I have to do to make it right.”

      The voice—that sweet, dark voice—was there in an instant. The presence of it after so much terrible silence was almost as jarring as that scream of rage had been and Vic toppled forward onto hands and knees, then collapsed onto his forearms so that his brow was pressed into the carpet.

      “Tell me!” he begged.

      With a whisper as soft as bat wings on an autumn night, Ubel Griswold named the price for redemption. It hit Vic hard—harder than he thought it would. Nevertheless he closed his eyes and kissed the floor. He would do anything—even that—for his god.

      (3)

      Ruger touched the handle, feeling the roiling darkness beyond the door. Vic be damned, he was going out to hunt. To kill and to recruit; to build the