Necropolis:
Chapter One
by Tim Waggoner
I
was sitting in Skully’s, nursing a beer that I couldn’t
taste, and which I’d have to throw up later, and trying
real hard to look like I was minding my own business when
the lyke walked in.
He
(I knew it was male only because I’d been told) stood
well over seven feet tall. But he didn’t have to stoop
to enter the bar. Since Skully’s is located close
the Wyldwood, a lot of his customers are lykes, who usually
wear their wildforms, and he’d designed the nine-foot
high entranceway to accommodate the specialized —
and mutable — physiognomy of his clientele.
The
lyke, Honani by name, stone-cold killer by rep, was one
of the newer Breeds, a mixblood — lyke biology tweaked
by the hand of genetic engineering. But as far as I was
concerned, he was an ugly mess. I could pick out badger,
puma, crow and what I thought was a bit of snake around
the eyes. He looked almost as ugly as one of Lady Varvara’s
demonkin. Almost.
Honani
stomped across the hard-wood floor, the boards creaking
beneath his considerable weight. Even for a lyke, he was
massive, and the other bar patrons, who’d all looked
up when the nightmarish hodge-podge had entered, suddenly
found much more interesting corners of the room to direct
their attention to.
I
noticed that the lykes Honani passed wrinkled their noses
in disgust, and I was glad my own olfactory senses were
as dead as the rest of me.
Honani
walked up to the bar, slapped a paw on the shoulder of an
insectine demon with tangleglow-delivery tubes implanted
in his temples, and threw him/her/it backwards. The demon
squealed in fright as it sailed across the room and smashed
into a table, disrupting a game of bloodshards between several
vampires with holo implants. The table collapsed the bloodshards
winked out of existence and the vampires hissed in cold
anger, displayed their incisors, and turned to glare at
Honani. But as much as they might’ve liked to, they
didn’t make a move toward the lyke. He was just too
damn big.
“Jim
Beam,” he growled, the words barely recognizable coming
out of his inhuman mouth.
Skully,
who so far had eyed, or perhaps a better word in his case
might be socketed, the situation dispassionately (which
is the only way he could react, given his complete lack
of facial muscle and skin) looked at Honani for a long moment
before finally nodding his ossified pate and setting a bottle
of the requested liquor on the counter in front of Honani.
Skully unscrewed the cap with his fully fleshed fingers,
set it down, and then reached for a glass.
“Leave
it,” Honani said, then grabbed the bottle and drank
the entire contents down in three gulps. He tossed the empty
over his shoulder, and it shattered against the floor boards,
the brown remnants of the whiskey mixing with the other
less identifiable substances which had soaked into the wood
over the years.
Skully
normally doesn’t put up with much shit. He keeps a
silver broadaxe behind the counter, but he hardly ever has
to use it. Rumor is that he has ties to the Dominari, Necropolis’
version of the Mafia, and while he’s never admitted
it to me, he hasn’t denied it, either. If the Descension
celebration hadn’t been in full swing — and
Honani already likely drunk before he even came in here
— he would’ve had more sense than to act like
such a dick. Probably. But Skully didn’t reach for
his axe. Instead he looked over at me (at least I think
he looked at me; it’s kind of hard to tell when the
person you’re talking about doesn’t have any
eyes), and I nodded. Show time. If I still had a pulse,
it would have been racing.
I
stood up.
“My
friend,” I said just a bit too loudly, “you
are the butt-ugliest sonofabitch in the city.” And
considering the citizenry of Necropolis, that was saying
something.
The
thick muscles in Honani’s shoulders rippled and tensed
beneath his fur. The other people (and I use the term extremely
loosely) in the bar drew in surprised gasps of air. Those
that breathed, anyway.
Honani
turned around. His lips curled back from his sizable teeth
in a snarl, and his eyes burned feral yellow.
“I
ain’t your friend.”
“If
you were, I’d suggest you have a surgeon remove your
ass and graft it onto your face. It’d be a vast improvement.”
The
big lyke just stood there a moment, blinking in confusion
while his alcohol-sodden brain struggled to process what
I’d said. Either he figured it out or decided to give
up and just assume I’d insulted him. Either way, he
let out an ear-splitting shriek and came at me.
You
know the old cliche about how time seems to slow down when
you’re in danger? It’s true. Unfortunately,
being dead, my reflexes aren’t what they once were,
so the shift in time perception didn’t do me any good.
But twenty years’ experience as a cop can make up
for a whole hell of a lot, and thus I was able to sidestep
just as Honani’s claws — which had lengthened
to twice their previous size and were still growing —
raked the air where my chest had been a moment earlier.
I
was a bit slow, however, and the lyke’s razor-sharp
talons sliced through my Marvin the Martian tie, decapitating
the cartoon spaceman. I watched Marvin’s headless
body flutter to the floor.
“Goddamnit!
Do you know how hard it is to come by ties like that around
here?”
Honani
didn’t sympathize with my sartorial loss. Instead,
he lunged forward, mouth wide open, jaw distended farther
than should have been anatomically possible, and fastened
his twisted yellow teeth on my shoulder. I didn’t
feel a thing — except regret that along with my tie,
I’d also lost a perfectly good suit jacket and shirt.
But
before he could take a hunk out of me, he pulled back, his
face scrunched up in disgust, and spit great gobs of foam
and saliva to the floor. “You’re a deader!”
he accused.
“Guilty
as charged. You’d have known that if you’d bothered
to smell me.” Mixbloods’ patchwork physiology
doesn’t always function properly. It was quite possible
his sense of smell was no better than an ordinary human’s.
Though
the idiot should’ve been able to tell just by looking.
It’d been a while since my last application of preservative
spells, and I wasn’t too fresh — skin gray,
dry and beginning to flake. I probably didn’t taste
too good either.
As
if emphasizing this last point, Honani spit once more then
looked at me with disdain. “Go back to the Boneyard,
zombie. Your kind isn’t wanted around here.”
And then he turned and walked toward the bar.
Honani’s
reaction was understandable. Most zombies are little more
than undead automatons under the control of whoever raised
them, and hardly a threat to a lyke as strong as Honani.
But I’m not most zombies.
I
removed a glass vial full of gray dust from the inner pocket
of my suit jacket and pried off the cork. And then I made
a leap for Honani.
My
reflexes may be slower, and I’m no stronger than I
was when alive, but I can get the job done when I have to.
I threw my left arm around Honani’s chest and with
my right jammed the vial into the lyke’s massive maw
and emptied the contents. There wasn’t much in the
vial, but a little was all that I needed.
Honani
choked and sputtered and then I felt a distant tearing sensation.
I stepped back from the lyke, still clutching the mostly
empty vial. Something was . . . and then I realized what
had happened: my left arm was gone. The preservative spells
were breaking down fast.
Honani
whirled around and brandished my detached limb like a club.
Behind him, I saw Skully lifting his silver axe, ready to
strike, but I shook my head and he lowered his weapon.
“You
— fucking — corpse!” Honani advanced on
me, no doubt intending to pound me into grave mold with
my own arm. But he only managed a few steps before he doubled
over in pain. He dropped my arm and it hit the floor with
a meaty plap! His breathing became harsh, labored, and he
started whining like a wounded animal, which, I suppose,
he was.
“You
shouldn’t have killed her, Honani,” I said.
“Lyra was a simple working girl; it wasn’t her
fault you couldn’t get it up.” Like I said,
mixblood physiology doesn’t always work right.
He
fell to his knees, breathing rapidly now. His entire body
shook, as if a great struggle were occurring within him.
“That
dust I dumped into your mouth was part of Lyra’s ashes.
Not much, but enough. You took her life; now you’re
going to give it back.”
He
rolled onto his side, quivering uncontrollably in the throes
of a violent seizure. His eyes had lost all of their anger
and wildness and were now rolled up in their sockets.
This
was it.
With
my remaining hand, I reached into one of my jacket’s
outer pockets and removed a small clay jar. I shook off
the lid, which was attached by a short length of twine,
then knelt down next to Honani’s head and held the
open jar in front of his mouth.
His
exertions lessened bit by bit and finally his body grew
still. And then, as I watched, thin whitish wisps curled
forth from between his teeth, lazily at first, but then
the jar’s magic began to draw them in, and they flowed
out of his mouth faster and faster, until at last they were
done. I set the jar on the floor, put the lid back on tight,
and then slipped Honani’s soul into my pocket.
Honani
— or rather his body — began to stir. I put
my right hand beneath one of the lyke’s sweaty armpits
and lifted. I don’t know how much help I was, but
a few moments later, the body was on its feet again.
Lyra
swayed dizzily and for a moment I thought she might fall,
but then she steadied herself and gave me a toothy smile.
“It
worked!” The voice was Honani’s, but yet it
wasn’t.
I
nodded. “Of course. Didn’t Papa Chatha say it
would?” I decided not to tell her that sometime Papa’s
spells failed, often in quite spectacular — and deadly
— fashion. Why spoil the moment?
She
ran her hands across her new body. Luckily, Honani’s
claws had retracted during the struggle for possession of
his form, or else she would have sliced herself to ribbons.
“It
feels so strange . . . and I’m male now, aren’t
I?”
“Yes.
But it’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”
“Oh,
yes, much!” And then she looked at me. “I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean —”
I
held up my remaining hand. “That’s okay. I know
what you meant.” Would I have traded in my undead
carcass for Honani’s body? Maybe. Probably. I don’t
know.
She
pointed at my empty, ragged left sleeve. “Your arm!”
“Don’t
worry about it. Occupational hazard. Papa’ll fix it
up for me.” I hoped.
She
regarded me for a moment, and I could see the confusion
in her eyes.
“Something
wrong?” I asked.
“I
. . . I don’t know what to do now.” She shrugged
her massive shoulders.
“You’re
alive; do whatever you want.”
She
grinned, and even though I knew it was Lyra inside the body,
the sight of all those teeth being bared still unnerved
me. “You’re right.” She came forward and
gave me a hug that, if I hadn’t been dead, most likely
would have killed me on the spot.
“Thank
you, Matthew.”
I
wanted to respond, but I couldn’t pull any air into
my dead lungs to do it. She released me, then with a wave,
left the bar for whatever her new life held in store for
her. I couldn’t help but envy her.
Everyone
watched her go, and then Skully said, “All right,
show’s over,” and his customers returned to
drinking, talking, laughing, the incident well on its way
to being forgotten. Just another day in Necropolis.
I
walked up to the bar and sat on one of the stools.
“Looked
pretty hairy there for a minute,” Skully said. “Pun
intended.” He grinned at that, but then he always
looks like he’s grinning.
“You
know, I can never figure out how you talk without lips or
a tongue.”
“Just
talented, I guess.”
“Right.”
I got off the stool. “Thanks for letting me conduct
my business here.”
“No
sweat. What’re friends for?”
“Gotta
go. Papa’s waiting.” I started to leave.
“Matt?
Don’t forget your arm.”
“Oh,
yeah. Right.” I bent down to retrieve it, more than
a little embarrassed, and then continued toward the door.
I was half aware of some of the bargoers watching me as
I left, especially a reed-thin, attractive blonde woman
dressed in tight black leather sitting in the corner. If
I’d still been alive — but I wasn’t, so
I continued on my way.
However,
it wasn’t until later that I discovered that as soon
as I’d walked out the door, the blonde got up and
followed.
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