4

ARMY-TRAINED REFLEXES MOVED FASTER THAN my active mind. I grabbed Alan Carruthers’s wife in a bear hug, running hard from the predicted drop zone of the grenade. She screamed “No!” in my ear before I dived to the ground and pinned her to the floor, covering her with my male sprawl as I counted, three, two—

BANG!

The air sizzled with shrapnel, sounding like live blenders flying around the room. I hugged Alan’s wife close, hands pinned under my chest. Every fiber of my body was itching to reach for a rifle I didn’t have to return fire. My lungs crackled as I took in a huff, then I felt lines of pain perforating my back, and heard cries of horror around me.

I pulled myself off of Mrs. Carruthers. Her eyes were wide, hands shaking. “Hey!” I said, hard and firm. “Listen! We have to get you out. Can you walk?”

She didn’t respond.

I flicked the bridge of her nose.

Her disgust with me returned while fresh pain and wetness drizzled down my back. “You!”

“That’s better.”

Her eyes shifted to what was behind me. “Oh god.”

I turned.

All the vets were scrambled on the ground, but you could see the red-splashed epicenter. At the edge were the chairs we’d been sitting on, ripped by shrapnel.

“You . . . you saved me,” she said.

I turned back. “Yeah, now do me a favor and keep living.”

Up on the stage, Alan held his plaque. Shrapnel was an inch deep in his legs. Blood trickled down his face. “You okay?” I yelled over the groans of the dying.

He nodded, then dropped the plaque; it was studded with shrapnel that would have torn into his chest or neck.

Hazy, adrenaline blazing, I got up, yanked the woman from the floor. “Both of you, get out the back. Now!” I ran toward the horror.

Dead center was Cactus. Back shredded, body shaking, covering some old timer with liver spots and a ghostly countenance.

“Cactus!” I yelled.

“Brimstone!” he shouted back in a voice colder than a dead nun’s heart. “Get the bastard, Brimstone! Now!”

I looked to the stage. Alan’s wife had made it to her husband. She nodded at me, so I ran for the door. If the shithook who had wounded these men was out there, he would not find my backside.

My shoulder smashed the door open, but outside my lungs burned. The sea of hair and faces swirled with screams. I had no patience for their chaos. Words raced through my mind, as they always did when I caught a bullet.

Time for joyriding.

Concentrating on William Blake’s poetic refrain—Tyger Tyger, burning bright!—I felt the world become quicksand as my mind and body slid into each other and then—crack!

I entered a state of Transcendental Consciousness, what I called a joyride. The world slowed for a heartbeat, but I moved at my own pace, shoving, snaking, darting through the plaid flannel and tan leather head bands, the placards and bright-colored beads, moving fast as Kato on The Green Hornet, but knowing I’d pay a full and heavy price when I eventually got out of this dangerous Zen state.

Among the throng, the faces hadn’t changed, but some had vanished, the crowd spreading out like a secondary ring of impact from the grenade.

The gentle giant with the ticking hand? He was gone. As well as the kids with skateboards. The angry lady with dark glasses was screaming, running toward the parking lot.

There was a motorcycle thirty yards away. Two bodies mounted on the chopper. Big. The arm of the one in the rear was thick and meaty, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the calm blond or the manic beast I’d seen earlier. I ran while the world waltzed in molasses, gunning for the bike. I noted the motorheads had no patches, no insignia, not even poorly stitched nametags . . . and bikers were proud of their colors. Even for a hit and run.

I’d cut half the distance before agony flooded my brain. Joyriding this long was close to lethal. One stride, and the slowed cries behind me mangled the air while the driver of the hog revved his clutch, which, while joyriding, sounded like a long, wet fart.

Another big step and the world blurred. I was cutting the distance between me and the monsters who threw that grenade, but the colors of life began to melt and sponge around me. One more step, just two arm-reaches away from them, and reality fluttered through me like spoiled film running wild and melting from the projector until there was nothing onscreen but a blinding white.

Reality slapped back and hit me so hard I tripped over my own wingtips, crumpling to the ground with both nostrils gushing blood like a ruptured oil tanker. Face hit asphalt.

The screech of the hog’s wheels burning rubber and ghostly exhaust pounded my face as I reached out into the smoke and grabbed nothing. The hog hit Slauson and bolted beyond my anger.

All my systems went numb.

The air was fresh with screams. My vision flooded with a darkness that stretched time like a hippo eating saltwater taffy.

I thought of Chosin. Ice filled my veins, then the shaking started. Behind me, men were holding their guts in with their own hands; medics were coming but would be too late. Cactus was the toughest thing I’d seen on two legs in the mortal world, but even an Apache warrior-Mexican guerrilla would hit walls they could not climb, fight battles they could not win. As my own pain switched to the “on” position, my ass hissed in anguish and my head pounded with the steady grind of a Soviet tank factory. My stomach churned at the cowardice of what had happened. The irony of it. Peaceniks throwing a grenade at veterans. L.A. was more vicious and deranged by the second.

Then, intense flavor bit my tongue. Sour and shimmering. My mouth involuntarily spat out the taste’s name. “Magic.”

Slick, sick, no-bullshit, premium-grade arcana. I staggered back up onto my feet and tried to rub the supernatural tang off with the back of my hand, but it clung to my lip.

A dark image fluttered before me.

A flower. It fell to the earth, soundless beneath the screams of the wounded and cries of the bystanders, petals as thin as bee’s wings and supple as a harpist’s fingers. Nine petals, one for each head of the demon dragon whom its gardeners worshipped—symbol of the dreaded Tiamat.

A single dollop of blood dropped from my nose. It raced with the flower, which won by some mystic means.

At my feet lay a Black Lotus of Cimmeria. Extinct for three thousand years.

“Well,” said a voice as gravely as old concrete and familiar as a slap. “What a goddamn surprise. Jimmy Brimstone is present at another goddamn massacre.”