Damn Him to Hell Page 3

  By the time I finally heard sirens, it had been more than three hours since we’d first seen the cloud. It was now practically covering the entire Zone, officialdom was just checking in, and Milo was fast asleep at my feet.

  Propping the cell phone against my ear as Bill reported relieving Andre at the bar, I checked the corridor at the sound of pounding on a door. Emerging from the hospital room, Julius waved me away to indicate he had matters in hand.

  I liked Julius, but he was a neurotic hermit and not necessarily dependable. I told Bill that the authorities were heading his way, then took a quick survey of the premises, as it had occurred to me that by incoming Andre likely meant new patients, not bombs or cops.

  Three more cots had been set up in the room with Beauty—who hadn’t flicked an eyelid. She lay there in eerie stillness even as voices shouted from the tunnel and wheels and running feet racketed outside in the hall.

  “They were pounding the stuffing out of each other, then whap!—just like that, they keeled over,” a sharp, curt voice said from the hallway. Frank. Frank was a detective because he had a talent for finding what was lost. Strange, but again, it was best not to question. Not with Frank. Not with Cora, my best friend down here, who conjured snakes. And definitely not with Sarah, who was even weirder, not to mention scarier, than me—and I’d sent my boyfriend to hell.

  Life in the Zone was never boring.

  I left the infirmary to watch Frank rolling a gurney carrying a frail old man. Julius tested his pulse and checked under his eyelids. I got out of their way.

  The patient on the gurney wore the rough clothes of the homeless encampment. He didn’t move a muscle or make a sound as he was unceremoniously rolled from one mattress to another. Just like Sleeping Beauty, and Nancy Rose earlier, he was stone-cold out of it, and my skin crept with uneasiness.

  At this rate, we could have an encampment of zombies by noon.

  3

  I shoved an overgrown hank of hair out of my face and started making calls, attempting to discover what had happened to Nancy Rose. My shampoo-ad hair had been a reward from Saturn for sending Max to hell. Thus it was a source of both guilt and pleasure. Still dealing with my overdeveloped conscience, I hadn’t learned to accept my hair yet.

  I hadn’t meant to send Max to hell. I still didn’t have a rulebook about this Saturn’s daughter business. All I had was impossible-to-contact Themis, my dotty grandmother. And she wasn’t exactly what I’d call clear about facts, which made me assume there weren’t any. For all I knew, she could be one of the homeless living in the encampment, not that I’d recognize her if they rolled her in on a gurney.

  Sarah, the only other Saturn’s daughter I was aware of, looked more and more like a chimpanzee every time she took someone out. Without my knowing exact criteria one way or the other, her example had cured me of experimenting with my special abilities. Fearing that I was selling my soul to the devil for pretty hair had been a game changer that had me vowing to behave and never to use my erratic Saturn power again.

  Except . . . I’m not what you’d call a passive person. I’d spent a lifetime being bullied for looking like a wimpy geek—and I’d learned to fight back. So yeah, I was lying to myself if I thought I could stop using my planet-god-given ability to wreak havoc.

  “Where is Nancy Rose?” I asked when I finally reached Ernesto.

  “Still here. We’ve got a probl—” The phone went dead.

  I pounded the damned receiver against the desk.

  Can you see my dilemma as I watched my neighborhood crash and burn? I conceivably had the super-ability to fry all of Acme Chemical’s management in eternal flames for gassing my friends. But no matter how crazy-making furious I might be, I couldn’t convince myself anyone would deliberately explode chemical tanks. Who would I damn? And if I damned the wrong person, would I, in turn, be damning myself?

  Milo climbed on my lap, and I stroked him in an effort to calm down.

  “More incoming!” Andre shouted a little later, this time in person while I was helping Julius peel grubby clothes off comatose old people and scrub their withered limbs.

  I made a lousy nurse, but my landlady was worse. Pearl held her nose and picked up the rags with tongs to carry them to a covered trash can. Paddy hadn’t arrived with Pearl. Tim had said our mad scientist had come out of Pearl’s basement, sniffed the air, and wandered off without a hazmat. I half expected the incoming to be him.

  But instead this new arrival was someone else I recognized—Nancy Rose. I still hadn’t told Tim about her, hoping she’d have recovered by now. Stupid of me.

  Praying the chemical company hadn’t been experimenting with infectious diseases, I helped roll her onto a cot. She was younger and in better shape than the homeless guys, if totally zonked. But Tim started crying when he saw her.

  “She’s just asleep,” I said, trying to be comforting. I’d had enough crying for a lifetime, and under these conditions, it could be contagious. Tim had had a rough life, and I didn’t want to see him hurt. “See if Andre has more cots anywhere.”

  “Why can’t we take her to a hospital?” Tim sniffed and wiped his eyes.

  Andre folded up the gurney. “Because Acme is covering up the disaster by sweeping everyone into trucks and hauling them to the plant.” He’d removed the hood of his hazmat. His expression was grim and his hair was wet with sweat.

  “What—taking them to the plant?” I gaped in horror at the monstrosity of first nuking, then kidnapping the helpless.

  Andre tapped my jaw shut. “You said it yourself: we’re guinea pigs. Tim, move the theater seats to the walls, and Julius knows where there are more cots. I have all my men scrambling to pick up bodies as they drop, before Acme can steal them.”

  Murderous red rage must have shown in my eyes. Andre didn’t know precisely what I was capable of, but he’d seen my powers flood his bar and allow me to talk to Max in hell. He knew I wasn’t normal. He caught a hank of my overlong hair in his glove and tugged, then leaned over and planted a hot kiss on my cheek that seared my skin.

  “Don’t, Clancy,” he purred in my ear while my blood pressure went up in flames. “Whatever you’re thinking, just don’t. We need you to keep Senator Boyfriend on a leash.”

  My neglected breasts perked to attention and my libido sparked. Who wouldn’t melt if the sexiest man on the planet expressed concern like that? But no matter how hot Andre might be, I was too smart to fall for his considerable charms. The bastard was simply hoping to distract me, and talking about Dane was a bigger distraction than the kiss.

  I resented that all the world thought a slimy U.S. senator was my boyfriend, just because Max in Dane’s body claimed I had saved his life and kept calling me.

  I’d saved Max’s soul maybe, but the senator’s was burning in hell, where it belonged. My place in the scheme of things was murky, but I was quite clear that I wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend. I hadn’t had sex in months.

  Still, Andre had succeeded in bringing me down from my wrathful cloud enough to realize he was right about leashing Dane/Max. The senator’s conscience would have us shut down, and we’d all starve and go homeless.

  I would have to be the one to rein in his righteous huff, but we had more immediate problems. “Can’t we send cops after the body snatchers?”

  “The cops think Acme is being generous in offering in-house facilities to a bunch of homeless people with no insurance. You want to tell them otherwise? Keep it cool in here, Clancy. I’ve gotta get back to the street.”

  He had a point. The outside world thought we were slimy deadbeat trolls living in a slum. To them, Acme was a shining example of capitalism at its best. In People vs. Corporations, people lost every time.

  Leaving Julius and Pearl to clean up the patients and make them comfortable, Tim and I began moving theater seats. Cora found us a while later.

  “I told you to stay home,” I said ungratefully as she began hauling benches.

  “And I love you, too,” she re
torted.

  Cora is gorgeous. Tall, voluptuous, with creamy mocha skin stretched over dramatic cheekbones and hair cropped to accentuate the angles, she should have been a model or an actress. Instead, she manned the secretary’s desk at Discreet Detection and produced snakes from thin air. We all have our hang-ups. The Zone’s were just more intriguing than most.

  “Yeah, that and three bucks will get me a cup of coffee, for which I would kill right now,” I said. I hadn’t seen a kitchen down here, but I was betting there was one. It just required thinking like Andre to find it.

  I didn’t have the time or inclination to kink my mind that badly. I returned to communication central, wishing I knew how to fix things.

  Messages had piled up in my absence. I glanced at the clock—past six. I was dead on my feet and about to starve.

  Checking online, I saw that the morning news had finally picked up helicopter views of the gas cloud at dawn—a spooky roiling green and pink wide enough to spread over the dead zone by the water and a little way up the hill to the residential area above Edgewater Street, creeping closer to us on the far south side from the plant.

  Feeling sick thinking of the little kids living in those tenements on the hill, I turned off the TV and tuned in to the reports feeding directly to me through the computer.

  Which was when Frank’s all-caps subject header caught my eye—SARAH.

  Shit. I’d hoped she’d stayed home. With trepidation, I clicked the link in Frank’s message.

  It opened a video of guys in fancier hazmat than Andre owned loading Sarah onto a stretcher. It was unmistakably Sarah—frizzy bronze hair, torpedo breasts, and hairy chimp hands and feet. She must have passed out mid-change. Normally, when Sarah was startled, she morphed instantly into a chimp.

  Fear sank deep into my bones. Acme scientists would take every cell of her body apart to figure out how she did that—one of the many, many reasons we stayed under the radar. If she woke up, she had the potential to damn everyone in sight, even the good guys. Provided there were any good guys. Maybe I should just let Sarah take care of the justice problem for me. . . .

  Which brought forth another conundrum—did I go to hell for letting Sarah execute Acme officialdom when I knew she wasn’t qualified to judge fairly? I was beginning to think I needed to live in a hut in the Himalayas to avoid these mind-boggling moral dilemmas.

  The disaster was taking on new and deeper proportions, and my head was starting to throb. Milo put his paws on the keyboard and purred at me. Stupid cat. I put him back on the floor and buzzed Andre the video link. Answering a cell phone while wearing gloves is tricky, even if the Zone let him get the message, so I didn’t expect an instant response. But someone had to go after Sarah. I was enough of a coward not to want to be the one.

  Light-headed with hunger and fear, I pushed away thoughts of lawyers joining the souls of angry senators in hell. Cora came bearing steaming mugs of coffee and nuked Krispy Kremes from someone’s freezer. In return, I showed her Frank’s video. Her curses were more creative than mine.

  “Put your hair back, Medusa,” I chided when her favorite garden snake materialized and wrapped around her toned, bare arm.

  Cora nuzzled the snake, then sent him back to whatever dimension he occupied. Two years ago, when I’d first moved to Baltimore, I would have freaked out. After living with roaming Dumpsters and shape-shifting chimps, very little fazes me anymore.

  “Where’s Paddy?” she demanded.

  “Wandering the streets as usual as far as I know. Why?”

  “He’s the only one of us who can get inside Acme. He has to go after Sarah or they’ll have the body snatchers sweeping all of us into their zoo.”

  “We belong in a zoo,” I pointed out, but I got her drift, and it wasn’t a pretty one.

  History lesson: The brothers Vanderventer created Acme and built it into a wealthy powerhouse. Then they died and left the mess to their frustrated wives. Max’s grandmother had vacated her responsibilities, leaving Paddy’s evil mother, Gloria Vanderventer, gripping Acme with an iron fist. I held Gloria at least partially responsible for Dane’s diabolical involvement in Max’s death. Even so, body snatching was a new low for the woman.

  “Does Paddy still have an office at Acme?” I asked. He wasn’t reliable, but he was all we had. I just had to hope he wasn’t evil like his mother and son. Optimism doesn’t become me, so that was desperation speaking.

  “Paddy has free rein to wander over there,” Cora said, watching over my shoulder as I opened more messages. “Who knew Bill had an iPhone?”

  Hulking bartender Bill had videoed a gray-haired lady with a cane pounding the crap out of an ambulance attendant trying to pick her up off the street. She looked a hundred years old and not more than ninety pounds, but she beat the two-hundred-pound attendant away. Then fainted. She appeared lifeless, but my bet was that she was comatose like the others.

  Cora whistled. “That’s some wacky gas.”

  The video spun crazily, as if Bill had dropped the phone. Abruptly, we were watching a toppling blue mountain. I wanted to shake the screen to get a better perspective. A gloved hand grabbed a blue elbow. We caught a glimpse of a big shoulder being rolled onto a stretcher. And then all we saw was a plain white van driving away and pink particles drifting to the ground from a cloud of green.

  Bill had been wearing blue.

  Too appalled even to curse, I stared silently at the pink and green scene. Bill was a gentle bear of a man. He fed fish to Milo and looked out for me. He was my rock. Even though he wasn’t violent, he’d once raced to my rescue and chased baddies out a window for my sake.

  They couldn’t have taken Bill! Bill couldn’t be down. Why hadn’t he been wearing hazmat?

  Cora leaned over and punched off the message, then opened the next while cursing under her breath. Milo fled the room, and I couldn’t stop him. I needed to know what they’d done with Bill.

  We hastily clicked more messages, searching for more videos. We needed cameras on the street, damn it. Who had Bill?

  Of course, given the scrambled messages and photos of the Eiffel Tower the Zone was currently sending, even if we had street cameras, they would probably photograph Pluto and Mars. It was as if once the video of Bill had been allowed through, the Zone decided I’d had enough reality and needed a world tour.

  “I’m going out there. You can do this.” I got up and headed for the closet Andre had pointed out. If the only danger out there was pink gas and feisty old ladies, I could handle it.

  Cora didn’t argue. She slid into my seat and took over the controls. She worked computers daily, loved technology, and owned more equipment than I owned shoes. She was better at sitting still than me.

  The hazmat suit stank. I was barely five-five—if I stretched—and the suit was obviously intended for someone half a foot taller. It sagged around me like a bridal gown on a six-year-old. The boots flopped awkwardly despite all the adjustments.

  My biggest threat would be falling on my face and not being able to get up.

  Or Andre, if he caught me.

  He’d said this suit was only good for chemicals, not gas. I could ditch it, but I figured the breathing apparatus was better than breathing gas.

  My Saturnian need for justice was welling, undeterred by practicality. I had to see for myself that my pal Bill was safe before I blamed the world and wiped it out.

  With my temper, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of Armageddon.

  4

  South Baltimore is industrial. On any given day we can expect to smell garlic from the spice-packing plant, dead fish from boats in the harbor, or a rotten-cabbage stench from one of the chemical plants. Today, the air reeked of ozone, that fried electrical smell you get when a wire is going bad.

  Being able to smell the air probably meant I’d better figure out how to work the suit, but it didn’t come with instructions. I’m good at reading rule-books and manuals, not so hot at intuiting technology on my own.

 
Staggering around in a hazmat suit—even one of the lighter ones—isn’t as easy as it looks. But I couldn’t tolerate watching injustice without taking someone down. My first goal was to find Paddy and see if he could be directed into Acme to find Sarah and Bill. I’d drag the eccentric scientist by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin if I had to.

  Milo trotted after me. I sighed, glanced back to verify I’d firmly closed the warehouse door, then picked him up and put him in a pocket of the suit. He’d saved my life more than once. Who was I to argue?

  Shuffling downhill, I gathered momentum and a little stability. Deciding I’d rather not meet Andre coming up, I took the alleyways and practiced judicious concealment, sort of like in the good old days when I used to keep my head down and my mouth shut.

  That’s how I’d learned our Dumpsters traveled. I’d thought they were spying on me until one night I caught them dancing.

  A big rusted green bin rumbled into my path now. In a hurry, I tried to squeeze past it. When the stinky Dumpster tried to crush me against a brick wall, I kicked it in a rusted patch, tearing a hole in it. Then I clambered up the side and over. I spit into the garbage as I crossed, to show it who was boss.

  The erratic videos I’d been receiving hadn’t adequately depicted the fantastical image of the main business strip. The gas covering the Zone and harbor was more like drifting smoke than a heavy wet cloud. Sunlight filtered through, highlighting the sparkly pink particles. It made a great Disney effect. All we needed was a pink castle.

  Instead of frivolity, though, we had eerily empty streets in the shadow of the looming remains of burned-out storage tanks and incinerator chimneys.

  Since Chesty’s was the largest business in the Zone and had both liquor and food to attract crowds, I’d figured it was a good starting place for my hunt. Paddy sometimes hung out there. But I wasn’t ready to go in without scouting the territory. After the videos I’d received, I’d expected brawls on every corner. Where was everyone? Nervously, I peered from the alley beside Chesty’s to the main drag of Edgewater. Two people in the fancy style of hazmat suit were loading Officer Leibowitz into an unmarked van. Not an ambulance, a van. Now, I had no love for Leibowitz, our street cop. He was a rolling ton of lard who’d terrorized me, blackmailed a gay teenager, and used the law badly—but he was our crooked cop, and no human deserves to be treated like a guinea pig.