Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3) Read online

  He squealed, voice raw with pain. “Help me! Anya! Security!”

  I glanced back at the door, then down to Yegor. The door was probably armored, thick enough that I didn’t have to worry just yet. “Where is the stash, Yegor?”

  “Won’t tell you anything! Fucking suka!” He spat at me, and then squealed as I hauled up on his hair, my foot still pushing down on his hand. “Grrr-AAARGH-I’ll tell Sergei about this-”

  I backhanded him with the flat side of the hammer and let go of his hair. He went to the floor, shielding his face as I beat him over the arms and head, but he couldn’t hold his guard up forever. When his arms faltered, I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him back up to his knees.

  “You don’t get it. I want Sergei to know I was here.” I pressed the ball of the hammer against his temple. “So let us reason together, Yegor. Do you really want to die like this?”

  His nostrils flared as sweat from his nose and blood from his ears dripped from his face to the floor. He sagged in my hands.

  “Where does Vanya keep his cash?” I repeated, calmly.

  Yegor squeezed his eyes closed, pushing out a wave of fresh tears. I saw and felt him break, watched the armor shrink and fold away as he went limp.

  “We don’t keep cash any more. Not since Rodion died. There’s… there’s guns, drugs. That’s it,” he said, his voice thick with mucus and pain. “I swear, Alexi.”

  I wrinkled my nose, disappointed. He seemed to recognize the sign of my displeasure, because he kept babbling.

  “It’s all at Kozlowski and Sons, you know, the scrapyard. T-There’s a locked yard where they keep all these old school buses. Vanya u-used it as a switch point. He stores things in the buses… in the floors of the buses.”

  “And what kind of security do they keep around these buses?” I knew K&S well enough. Biggest scrapyard in New York. We took our stolen cars there.

  “I don’t know! B-barbed wire. Dogs. V-Vanya might have men there, I don’t know. Let me go, Molotchik, I didn’t have anything to do with Vassily–”

  Before he could continue - before I had time to get angry - I smashed the ball of the hammer into the side of his head several times, hard and fast. When I felt the steel catch, I tugged it free of his skull, pushed him away and stepped back, letting him fall like jelly to the floor. For several long minutes, Yegor gasped and convulsed his way through death, a process not nearly as sudden and final as movies were wont to portray. Eventually, he fell still.

  When word got back to Sergei that Yegor was dead, he’d know exactly who had taken his piece off the board. My klichka, the nickname I earned in the Organizatsiya, was Molotchik, ‘The Hammer’. I’d earned that name – half-honorific, half-stigma – after I put down my father like a rabid dog with his own prison sledge, continuing a tradition of patricide that had begun when my grandfather killed his father for joining the Bolsheviks in Ukraine. Sergei was good to be reminded how Sokolsky men dealt with their patriarchs.

  I went back around to the suitcase, set it on the desk, and opened it up. It held a roll of thick paper bags, a grooming kit, a small squirt bottle of bleach and one of isopropyl, and a complete change of clothes. Black leather gloves, shoes, socks, an identical blue tie, trousers, shirt, and a jacket, all neatly rolled. The suit was of a different material than the linen I’d worn into the office, a heavier wool suit in a similar, but not identical color.

  The aftermath of a hit was a ritual performed in very specific steps. From smallest to largest; from dirtiest to cleanest. I wrapped up the messiest things, the hammer, my jacket, and tie, and then stepped around to squirt Yegor’s exposed skin with the bleach. Face, hands, neck. The odor of chlorine burned my nostrils, a clinging, lurid pink smell.

  After that, I stripped and packed the dirty clothes into the suitcase along with everything else. I checked myself for blood, dabbing at my face - carefully, so I didn’t take off all the makeup I’d used to subtly change my features - then swabbed my hands and forearms with dilute bleach. Alcohol-soaked cotton got rid of the chlorine smell, and then I was able to investigate the filing cabinet.

  Yegor was right. A saint would know better than to think revenge was going to fill in the void Vassily had left behind. But it wasn’t just for me: it was for Jenner, who had lost her partner and friends; for Angkor, who was still trying to heal the brain damage done to him by the Deacon and his men. It was for Josie, the little girl I’d pulled out of a mad surgeon’s dungeon. That kid was going to need therapy for the rest of her life. Some of the others were still missing, being used to breed monsters. Others were dead, or locked in their own minds. Forever.

  “May your sons grow up to be better men than you and I, Yegor.” I set the carry-on down on the soft carpet, the best that money could buy, and locked the door on my way out into the relative cleanness of the city.

  Chapter 2

  Back outside, I merged into a thick crowd of suits, teased hair, blue jeans, and pork pie hats. A storm was coming. It was almost dark out, the sky swirling with hurricane clouds. As I passed by the bronze Charging Bull on Broadway, I heard a thick wet splat to my left, and turned to see a long, thin, dark stain - like gull shit - splattered across the bull’s head. A deep, bruised, rotten purple smell stung my nose, clinging all the way to Morris Street.

  Jenner and Angkor were waiting for me near the intersection, parked semi-legally by the side of the road. Jenner turned the engine while I got into the back with Angkor and my cat, pulled the wig off my head, and sighed with relief.

  “Jesus, Rex. I thought you said you worked clean,” Jenner said, the disgust in her voice palpable. “You smell like fucking roadkill.”

  “I do.” After what I’d just done, I didn’t feel much like chit-chat. Silent, I held my hands out to Binah. She left Angkor’s lap, stretching out like a ribbon of cream and lilac fur, but she hung back with uncharacteristic aloofness. Instead of throwing herself at me, she sniffed daintily over my fingers and the cuff of my suit jacket, her ears flat to her skull. When she relented in her inspection and oozed onto my lap, I brought my wrist to my nose. It wasn’t the smell of the office that I’d brought back: it was a faint shadow of the reek I’d breathed in while walking past the statue.

  “How did it go?” Angkor asked. If he noticed anything unpleasant, he was too polite to say so.

  “I got a name and some paperwork,” I replied, smoothing Binah’s ruffled coat under my palm. She crouched warily on my knees “MinTex, a shell company. According to Yegor, Vanya was using it to launder the proceeds of his operation, and as a cover to communicate with his clients. The kids’ organs were being handled by rabbis affiliated with the Organizatsiya.”

  “Crooked rabbis, huh?” Jenner wrinkled her nose. “What about that doctor-guy who was holding the kids in his basement? The house of horrors?”

  “Moris Falkovich. He was a middleman, did some of the implants stateside.”

  “Mmm. Well, it’s not much, but it’s a start,” Angkor slouched back into his seat, and I caught a glimpse of the long knife he carried concealed under his coat. “What about the money?”

  “The Organizatsiya no longer keeps physical cash,” I said, reluctantly. The pair of them had agreed to come out with me for this job and split the profits between us and the kids’ rehab. “He did, however, give me the location of a dead drop. We can go there and see what we find.”

  Jenner made a sound of agreement. “What do you think we’ll scrounge up?”

  “Guns, probably,” I replied. “Maybe drugs. Maybe jewelry.”

  “Well, hey, guns are good. I like guns.” Jenner perked up a little, but then sneezed and wiped her nose on the back of her arm. “But fucking hell, Rex, whatever you brought back in that suitcase of yours, it fucking stinks.”

  I looked over to Angkor. He shrugged, so I returned to Jenner. “Is your sense of smell as good as a tiger’s in HuMan form? Because I did clean up and change clothes.”

  “Not as good, but still better than your
s. I dunno – maybe I’m getting a migraine.”

  “Perhaps. Anyway, I have a contact who can find the organ brokers, the rabbis. I think that if you want to know where the rest of the children are, we’re going to have to get to the bottom of that and crack MinTex.”

  Rain began to pelt the windshield, blurring out the surrounding street as we crept through the bumper-to-bumper lower Manhattan traffic.

  “Ayashe can tap the right shoulders and follow that up in the Bureau. I’ll set Talya on it, as well. Girl’s some kind of computer genius.” Jenner’s voice was glutinous. She sniffled loudly, and both I and Angkor twitched. I was about to offer her a tissue when I noticed the edge of a rotten-meat stench cycling into the cabin.

  The ambient light outside dropped, sharply, as a sonorous moan tore the air and rumbled through the car. An awful ripple of energy washed over me in a crawling wave, and a heavy thump struck the roof of the car. Binah flew off my lap, spitting and slashing when I tried to catch her, and the water sluiced away by the windshield wipers turned pink… then crimson. Our view of the road disappeared under a greasy layer of blood and shredded flesh.

  “Jesus fucking doggystyle Christ!” Jenner switched the windshield wipers to their fastest setting, clearing a streaky window into the street just as a young yuppie in a business suit fell face-first to the ground in front of us, brained by a hunk of frozen meat and fat the size of a pot roast. Screams of horror rang out from all directions, and traffic froze as mobs of panicked, blood-soaked pedestrians surged between the cars, running into each other, slipping and falling on the suddenly treacherous ground. An older woman in a blue pantsuit was bowled over and fell to her hands and knees, screaming as she was drenched in the same rich, gruesome scarlet that was now pounding down in sheets over everyone and everything. Through it all, the sky continued to moan: a deep howl that made my teeth buzz.

  Angkor reached out and gripped me by the arm, nostrils trembling. “Alexi. Do you know the Story of the First War?”

  I jumped, surprised. “The First War?”

  “The First War was not a war. It was a rout. It came with the First Star to ever light the Mirror of the Sky. It came when that Star fell, screaming-”

  “-to the White ground,” I finished, pulling the words from the memory of a fever dream. Or rather, I’d thought it had been a dream. “Never forget that when The Morphorde appears… the skies scream.”

  Angkor nodded, face tense with controlled fear.

  In spite of the hellish downpour, traffic was moving again. Sort of. We were boxed in from the sides and unable to move forward while Yuppie Guy clawed his way up over the hood of our car with the help of a woman who’d been crossing the road with him. She was doing her best to get him on his feet, her fine white blouse plastered to her skin with blood, chunks of flesh nesting in her immaculate coiffure. Once he was up, she started trying to talk to him while he swayed against our car.

  “Get the fuck out of the way!” Eyes watering, Jenner laid on the horn and struck the wheel with her other hand. Horns were blaring up and down the road, mostly at us since we were the ones blocking traffic. White Blouse managed to pull Business Suit off the road far enough that we could pass around them and catch up to the cars in front.

  I was struck dumb by the noise, the smell, and the glimpses of the street I saw through the blinding flash-bang bursts of sound. To either side of us, blood-sheathed cars loomed out of the foggy steaming mess like skinned steers. On the sidelines, dozens of people had slipped and fallen as they ran and crawled to any shelter they could find. They crammed into doorways and alcoves to escape the falling chunks of meat and gristle. Umbrellas were smashed and abandoned; a disheveled man with a stringy beard, rail-thin and glassy-eyed, held his arms up as if in greeting, laughing at the groaning sky.

  My belly clenched with a sharp pang. Never forget that when the Morphorde appears, the skies scream...

  The old guy had been carrying a sign. It floated face-down in the gutter, which was backing up from the meat that was now falling more heavily than the blood. Chunks of it were striking the ground with such force that we heard them explode, frozen missiles shattering windows, puncturing awnings. A woman tried to protect her screaming children, bent over a terrified toddler strapped into a double stroller with her infant clutched to her chest and weathering the blows with her back. We all jumped at a second loud thump on our roof, then a bang, and then our view of the street vanished a second time as something round - the size of a human head - smashed into the windshield like a cannonball and smashed the glass. It bounced away in a tumble of dark hair.

  “Fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK!” Jenner braked hard and swerved as cars piled up ahead, but the wheels slid on the layer of hamburger pounded into the surface of the road. We hit the corner of the fender in front of us and jolted to a stop.

  Sirens had started up from every direction. I winced, jamming my fingers in my ears and folding over as the sound bored into my back teeth and up behind my eyes. My senses were getting overwhelmed by the cold, the stench, the wailing, the feeling of clothes clinging to my skin in the humid, frigid air.

  “Look. Up there.” Angkor pointed around the smashed-in part of the windshield. “There’s the edge of the storm. We’re almost clear.”

  With difficulty, I did, and he was right. The meat fall and the near-darkness was being pushed back by an advancing line of sweeping rain. I nodded, unable to speak, and instinctively clutched at his arm as my body just gave up under the agony of fifty different types of fucking sirens as police, fire, and ambulance all burst onto the road ahead and behind. Angkor was warm, a physical anchor I held onto as my vision simply shut off, leaving me blinded behind a wall of sound. At a loss, I reached back for Kutkha, for my magic. My Neshamah was there, and with the brief synaptic connection between us came a revelation.

  Harbinger. I tried to say the word aloud, but only managed a kind of spastic moan. My tongue and throat just wouldn’t work together. I shook my head and hands, pulling away from Angkor. He was saying something, his voice green flashes against the white. I couldn’t understand any of it.

  A roar built outside of my body, the meshed sounds of sirens, engines, people shrieking, feet on pavement, wheels on the road, while my Soul whispered the litany of the First War into my ears, over and over, like a skipped record. The rain was a harbinger, and as I ground the heels of my palms against my eyes, I returned to a vision of Eden.

  Mirrored sky. Glass land, White trees like coral, their leaves touching, their trunks surrounded by creatures of living spun glass. Their daughters, the Gift Horses, crouching on their branches… watching in innocence as the gentle wind whipped up into a tempest, and the moaning sky above their heads cracked and opened up the Void. The first color they saw was Red.

  “Red is the color of Wrath,” Kutkha said gravely. “The color of Hate, and the Force that inspires War. It is the color of the Siege, and the Fire that comes with it. Red is the color of the Sword, Alexi. And I fear that is what is coming.”

  Chapter 3

  There came a point where my body just gave up under the sensory assault and quit. I looked and sounded like a guy who’d had a stroke, complete with slurred speech, painful contorting tics, and the uncontrollable need to shake my hands and head. It was like retching without actually vomiting, dry-heaving through the muscles of the face, hands, and chest instead of out my gullet. It made me look like some kind of retard in front of Angkor. Being pissed about how ridiculous the tics were made them worse, and so I was in full Rain Man mode by the time we pulled into Strange Kitty and came to a clanking, smoking stop.

  “Rex? Are you dying?” Jenner’s harsh voice cut through the air like sword strokes. I jerked as each word landed against my skin, red and sharp. “Speak to me, man.”

  I was fully conscious inside of the opaque bubble of stimulation, but incapable of actually speaking beyond one word. Unfortunately, when I said it once, my mouth kept repeating it. At volume. “No. NO! NO!”

 
“Don’t worry, Jenner. He’s fine. Just having a, uh, neuron tangle.” Angkor’s voice felt like the rippling of milk, a sensation so strong that I could taste it. He slowed down his words when he spoke to me. “Come on, Alexi. Grab my sleeve.”

  Fuck. He thought I was a retard, didn’t he? Red-faced, I fumbled out and clenched his wrist through his clothes, letting him lead me blindly out into the rain. I still couldn’t see: the world was a flashing field of phosphine white, and I was a passenger riding along in a short-circuiting tank.

  I could smell that we were in the bikers’ clubhouse. First there was the smoky, boozy garage hangout, then the cleaner, dusty, old-house smell of the interior rooms. Angkor led me to a bed and helped me to lay down in the dim, cold room we shared, the bunkhouse informally known as the Barracks.

  “Sleep.” He only said the one word, and left me to lie alone.

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I shuddered my way into sleep, restless with the memories of the blood rain, the evidence still burning a hole in Jenner’s car, and the haunting not-memories of Eden.

  When I woke a couple hours later, I hurt all over. Binah was balled in the crook of my arm, her little body pressed to mine. I stroked her, and she began to purr as she uncurled and rolled onto her back so that I could reach her belly. The soothing, sky-blue sound felt like smooth fur, flowing over me in reassuring waves. After a few minutes, my sight faded back in. My familiar had her eyes closed. She was kneading the air with her paws.

  “Good girl.” I mumbled. It still came out without much in the way of vowels, but at least I could shape words again.

  Twenty minutes of feline-aided meditation later, I was able to get up and limp to the bathroom. A cold shower helped, as did a fresh shave. After that, I went back outside to get my things and change them over to my car. Someone called out to me, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. Consumed by tunnel vision, I mechanically acted out each required step. Dirty murder kit in the front seat under another bag. Keys, stick, gas, indicator. I drove us to a burger joint, got a combo meal and an extra cheeseburger, and gave the patty to Binah so we’d have something to eat during our scenic three-hour tour of New York City's dirtiest waterways and wetlands. Everything I’d used to pull the hit on Yegor had to go. The suit, contacts, and eventually the suitcase all went, flung out into long grass or trash cans or piles of junk. The gloves I’d worn were burned, to make sure no one could read my fingerprints—or my psychic imprint—from the impressionable leather.