Suckers - Jack Kilborn [61]
Vlad laughed. “Don’t worry. We have the situation well under control. And now, Harry McGlade, I’m afraid your time has come.”
Harry stared at the barrel of the shotgun. “Go ahead and kill me. But I beg you—let Andrew Mormon go. He’s innocent.”
“No one is innocent.”
“You’re right. Kill him first.”
“Hey!” I started to say, but my protest was drowned out by the much louder cry of “Stop! Don’t kill him!”
A girl pushed past Vlad and stepped between the shotgun and Harry. She looked about sixteen, was dressed entirely in black, and had enough metal in her face to be part cyborg.
Harry and Vlad both spoke at the same time: “Tanya…?”
If life were indeed like a box of chocolates, this evening had been one craptastic bitter orange jelly after another. You know the one—it looks deceptively like a chocolate cream or a truffle, but when you bite into it tastes like someone wiped an orange peel in an ashtray and then loogied on it and encased it in rubber. Those candies suck ass. Why even make those nasty things in the first place? Is anyone even listening to me?
Where was I? Oh yeah. Staring death in the face, again.
I was about to take the shotgun away from Vlad and introduce it into his unhappy place when Tanya exploded into the room and threw herself at me.
“We can’t kill him! He’s the One!” she yelled. Or something like that. I was still thinking about chocolates.
“He isn’t the One!” Vlad hissed.
“He has the Mark!” Tanya screamed.
“The Mark of the One? Where?”
“There! On his arm!”
We all looked at my arm, at a red blotch of psoriasis I’d been meaning to see a doctor about.
“It’s the Mark of the One!” Tanya said. “The Pentagram of Ba’al!”
“Looks like psoriasis,” said Andrew.
While I’m quick at many things, most of them horizontal, coming up with ingenious schemes on the spot to get myself out of deadly situations isn’t one of them. So I surprised myself where I raised up my hands in a grandiose way and bellowed: “All bow before the One!”
Everyone in the room bowed, except for my sauce buddy. We locked eyes for an instant, then ran like hell.
Andrew beat me out the door, and he moved like his feet were spring loaded. I huffed and puffed behind him, my own labored breathing drowning out the yells of confusion and chaos all around us. We went left, down a hall, right, down another hall, through the black light room with those two Bill and Ted Pires still stoned on the couch, and wound up right back where we started, facing Vlad and his shotgun.
Andrew back-pedaled, bumping into me, and we took off shoulder-to-shoulder in the direction we came from.
“Who the hell designed this house? M.C. Escher?” he asked.
“Is he still with the Wu Tang Clan?” I asked.
Down another dark hall, left, and right into a Pire with an aluminum baseball bat.
“I’m the One!” I intoned. “Bow before the Mark of Balls!”
He didn’t bow. He swung the bat. I tried to duck behind Mayberry, but at the same time he tried to duck behind me, and when our heads hit they actually did make a coconut sound.
The bat buried itself in the drywall, and while the Pire tugged at it, Andrew and I crawled around him and bumped into a door I hadn’t seen before. I reached for it, turned the knob, pushed it open, and then Andrew screamed in a most feminine way and pushed me forward.
We fell.
It’s disconcerting falling into darkness, and all I had time to do was let out a small yelp and clench my bladder closed before we hit the first stair. After taking three steps to the chin, instinct took over and I reached out for a soft pillow to hug to my chest and break my fall. It worked, and landing was a relatively painless process.
The pillow wasn’t amused.
“I think you broke some ribs,” he moaned.
I checked. “Nope. I’m fine.”
I climbed off Andrew and squinted at the darkness around me. It smelled like a root cellar, earthy and moldy, with and underlying hint of something.
“Now this,” my airbag said, “this is a pit.”
“Nice observation, bright boy. Now see if you can find a door to the outside.”
“Andrew?”
The voice came from the darkness,