Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

of panicky white people. How long do you think it will take the police to arrive? And who do you think the cops will believe when I tell them that you’re random thugs looking to commit a little rape and pillaging?” Crouched as I was behind the kitchen counter, they couldn’t see what I was doing, giving me a small opportunity to surprise them. I was fairly certain that Baja had seen me bring the knives down and he wouldn’t get too close. But Baja wasn’t my initial target. He knew how to behave himself when he wanted to.
Kootch was the real problem. That guy was six kinds of cracked and none of it was good. There is no telling what a guy like that would do if he had me at his mercy, and I doubted that even Baja could control him once he was on a roll. I was going to take out that crazy-assed piece of trash before I did anything else.
Blessedly, police sirens sang softly through the air, growing louder with each passing second. Baja swore violently and both men threw caution to the wind and charged my position. Baja appeared on one side of the island counter with his gun aimed directly at my face. I stared calmly at it, unafraid of what would happen next. Either he would shoot me or he wouldn’t. The end result would be the same. I would live through it. Whether I was pissed off about it was entirely up to how many holes he wanted to put into me.
“Kootch, take the knives away and grab her. We got to go,” Baja barked. The sirens were loud enough that the police had to be roaring into the parking lot and rushing the stairs. I wondered how Baja planned to get me out of here without getting busted. I certainly wasn’t going to help him.
Kootch put his gun behind his back and reached for me. I watched him get close, his narrow face leering at me with sadistic lust as he bared rotting teeth stained yellow from chewing tobacco. Most of his lower front teeth were gone, leaving ugly pits in his gums. My revulsion showed on my face and he scowled at me as he reached for one of my hands to wrench the knife away. I let him seize my wrist, and then I brought up the knife in my other hand and plunged it into his flesh.
I have bad aim. Half the time I try for one spot of the body, I end up hitting something else entirely, leaving my enemy either unintentionally dead or badly crippled. I usually feel bad about these inaccuracies but I simply couldn’t summon empathy for Kootch as he howled and clutched at his groin. I’d gotten him right in the crotch when I had intended to get him in the thigh. Whoops, my bad.
Baja swore violently and rushed up to me. I had just enough time to look up and see the butt of his gun descending toward my face. Then stars flashed before my eyes and I felt my body flop against the floor. He hit me again, and I lost consciousness.
I awoke stretched out on a leather couch and wondering how in the hell Baja got Kootch and me past the cops. I had been certain that they were all but upon us by the time he knocked me cold, so I should be staring up at the ceiling of a hospital. Instead, I was trying to make my eyes focus on a slowly revolving fan in a dimly lit room. I could make out a massive painting hanging over the couch I was laying on. It was a portrait of some random nobleman circa the Renaissance done in muted colors against a black background. I didn’t make the effort to take in the rest of my surroundings. My head hurt and my nose and left cheek throbbed painfully. Turning my head would only make it hurt worse.
“You’re awake. Baja had worried that he had killed you.” The voice was low and melodious, the kind of voice that was most often used by actors and pretentious assholes. “Kootch, on the other hand, prays that you experience a long and agonizing demise. He is quite angry that you had stabbed his testicles.”
“Yeah well, shit happens when you bust through people’s front doors. Maybe he’ll remember that next time he decides to do something stupid,” I replied calmly. “Of course he would have been spared a great deal of pain if you had just picked up the phone, or told them to knock first.”
“I would not have had to send them if you had not called the police to report the demise of Charles Abernathy.”
At those startling words I sat up gritting my teeth against the pain that sang through my skull. I was in an office, which was better than the dungeon or torture chamber I could have found myself in, but still not good because I didn’t know where I was. I was at one end of a large room preferred by high-powered corporate types who sat behind giant desks with tall windows at their backs. The man had the desk, but no windows. Instead there was another painting hung on the wall, this one a blur of red and black with figures contorting in hideous ways as blue demons ate at them with wide fanged mouths. There was a pair of simple chairs before the desk, and the walls embraced a bookshelf and a couple of framed objects that looked older than I was. Across the floor between the desk and the couch where I was sitting, was a very large, antique area rug woven into geometric designs. It all screamed wealth and power obtained through acts of corruption and murder.
“I didn’t call the cops,” I snapped. I squinted at the man behind the desk. The light in the office was so dim that I couldn’t make out any of his features without getting closer.
“Really? So it is coincidence that the police came upon my cleaners dumping Abernathy’s remains into the Chattahoochee River?” he sneered.
“Maybe your cleaners aren’t very good at what they do,” I suggested. I touched my cheek and jaw where Baja had hit me and was delighted to discover that he hadn’t broken anything. But the skin felt tender and swollen and my brain felt as if it had been rattled around inside my skull. If I didn’t have a bruise yet, I was going to have a nasty one soon. I wanted a mirror. “Who are you anyway?”
“Come closer and see for yourself.”
I gazed at him from across the room and felt the thin darkness filling the space like a heavy screen between us. There was something strange about it, as if the lack of light was tangible, and if I stretched out my hand I could have touched it. It was unnerving, and made me reluctant to move from the couch where the nearby lamp pooled its weak light around me. “You come closer. I’ll stay right here.”
The man laughed as if I’d told an outrageous and filthy joke. “You are an immortal creature. What have you to fear?”
There are few sensations as profound as the feeling of blood freezing in your veins. It is the ultimate ‘Uh-Oh’ moment when you know that you’ve been cornered and the only options left to you are the unpleasant ones. I leaned back on the couch and crossed my arms over my chest and glared at the man as hard as I could. I doubt it impressed him very much. A girl has to be very big and ugly indeed to intimidate any man, and then she was rarely able to do it from across a room. I don’t have any of the necessary qualities to pull it off. However, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try. “How did you know?”
“Your lovely eyes are a key indicator of what you are. Nothing human has eyes that shade. Tell me, how did you achieve it?” The man leaned forward as if he was about to receive a profound secret. I have none to give.
“I don’t know. I think was born this way,” I shrugged, assuming he was talking about immortality.
“All things that are born can die, that is a universal truth for all life great and small, except for you. Surely you can recall some potion, spell, or act of god that stripped you of your mortality and left you eternal. What was it?” He shifted in his seat, and the lamplight caught his eyes just so, making his retinas flare a pale blue. I stared at the strangeness of it and wondered. Normal human eyes flash red or green if they are blind.
“I don’t know,” I repeated. As the man stood, the air in the room thickened into a cool primordial soup, like the atmosphere of the British Isles before the Romans arrived and Hadrian built his silly wall. It smelled of brackish water and rotting vegetation that had not been experienced since the Picts and Celts did battle over every patch of rocky earth. It crawled across my skin and made my muscles jump in terror even while my brain was suddenly teased into curiosity. I have traveled the world for more than two thousand years and I thought I had encountered every kind of creature and people the planet had to offer. This man was a new thing and that alone was enough to drive away any fear I had.
“Have you truly believed that you were unique in the world?” The man moved around his desk with an alien grace that was beautiful and frightening at the same time. Fascinated, I watched him and knew that he wasn’t human, not in the way I understood it. He was tall, no big deal in this day and age and in this country. Everyone here was well fed and enormous compared to some other places I could name. But his arms and legs were a little to long for his torso, and his spine and neck bent in lines that were lovely to look at and would have paralyzed an ordinary mortal. He wore loose clothing tailored to fit his strange physique, and his big feet were bare upon the plush carpet. I strained my eyes to look upon his face, but the strange shadows covered his features no matter how he moved.
“The thought had crossed my mind.” I sat up straighter on the couch and watched him move toward me. His feet touched the rug and he moved across it with hardly a whisper of sound. It was as if he glided softly across the surface without pressing his weight into the delicate fabric. Watching him, I continued speaking, “But I stopped caring about it after five hundred years.”
He smiled then exposing long, white, even teeth that glowed against the darkness cloaking his face. It was like I was looking at a bipedal version of the Cheshire cat. “Why would you stop looking?” he asked.
“There was no evidence to prove otherwise.” My voice had gone weak and breathy with wonder. What was this man? What could he do? Was I about to discover that I am not alone in the universe after all?
“Perhaps