4

KICKING BHUT

I stared after the shambling figure, and I think my mind must work more like a slot machine than a Magic 8-ball; options and choices and clues whirred behind my eyes: walk-in spirit—animating a corpse—not touching the ground—dressed mostly in white—not casting a shadow—bluish tint to the skin… and ding ding ding! Jackpot! Only instead of dumping a pile of coins in my lap, the slots behind my eyes usually drop a big steaming pile of crap into my life.

The thing was a bhut.

I passed Sig coming out of the restaurant as I stuck my head back in. Dropping the canvas chair tote bag, I quickly pulled my fighter pilot jacket off. It was freezing outside, but I was probably going to have to smear earth all over myself at some point, and I didn’t want to mess the jacket up even if keeping it intact was becoming a major pain in the ass.

I tossed the jacket to Molly and indicated Kevin Kichida with my eyes. “Watch my jacket, okay?” She saluted me with a casual swipe of her hand. Pursuing things rapidly down city streets isn’t really her thing.

Shouldering my tote bag again and still wearing a replacement hoodie, I pulled on my stocking cap and gloves while I caught up with Sig. She was trailing the bhut from about ninety feet, walking briskly but not quite jogging in her cream-colored winter coat, no hat, no gloves, no sign of discomfort or weapons though I knew she had a SIG Sauer holstered under her jacket. When I caught up with her, she stopped and addressed me. “Do you think this thing is going to disappear or start attacking people if we fall back a little?”

“Probably not,” I said.

Sticking her hands in her pockets, Sig nodded. “Then let’s follow it from further back and see where it takes us.”

“Okay,” I agreed. My nose could follow the bhut’s trail if we lost visual contact, anyway. “But if we wind up fighting it, smear yourself with mud and find something iron or steel to hit it with.”

Sig grimaced, probably at the mud part. “Anything else I should know?”

I slapped my hands together energetically and blew out a big puff of steam while we lingered. “Well, let’s see. Donkeys kill more people every year than plane crashes. If you get lost in the woods, you can figure out which way is north by—”

Sig gave me a small punch on the shoulder and started walking again, but not before I saw the faint smile flickering at the corner of her mouth. “About this thing we’re chasing.”

I followed her. “It can make that body it’s using strong. Lift-a-burning-car-off-a-child strong. It has some telekinetic powers too, but they’re mostly maxed out keeping it floating a fraction of an inch off the ground.”

Sig nodded. “So it’s one of those has-a-dysfunctional-relationship-to-the-earth types.”

“It is,” I agreed. “Holy things will work against it. And burnt turmeric root.”

“That would be great if that health food store we passed wasn’t half a mile in the other direction.” Sig sounded a little impatient.

I shrugged. “We don’t really want to drive it off, anyway, do we?”

“No.” Sig began picking up her speed slightly. Our prey was roughly a quarter mile ahead of us now. “So, what is this thing?”

“It’s called a bhut.” I matched her pace. “It’s a kind of evil Hindu spirit. What makes it different from other ghosts is that it doesn’t have to form an obsessive attachment to anyone or anything to hang around.”

Sig eyed me peripherally. She knows a lot more about ghosts than I do, and what she knows, she knows more intimately, but I could tell that this was a new one on her. All she said though, was: “Maybe that’s why it can’t touch the ground.”

I nodded. Almost all ghosts are defined by the anchor that keeps them on this earth. Ghosts that obsess on a place can possess anyone in their territory, but they can’t leave it. Ghosts who fixate on a person can follow that person anywhere, but they can only possess others who are connected to that person. Ghosts who fixate on an object can only focus on people who come into contact with that object. Bhuts just don’t give a shit.

Sig’s eyes stayed focused on the bhut in the distance like an eagle staring down at a field mouse. “So, this thing doesn’t have any limits? It can go anywhere? Possess anyone?”

“Yeah, but not for very long. As soon as a bhut moves into a person or object, its new body starts breaking down,” I expounded. “That’s what the bluish tinge in that guy’s face is all about. Whoever was there before the bhut moved in? That’s a dead body up ahead of us now. A bhut is like ghost poison.”

Sig absorbed that. “These bhuts must have been some seriously toxic assholes when they were alive.”

I agreed. “They were all extremely violent people.”

“Well, so are we.” Sig said that as if she was grimly determined, not as if she was struggling with self-doubt. Along the way, Sig plucked a snow shovel out of a display rack in front of a privately owned hardware store and kept walking, casually ripping the plastic top and the handle off of the wooden haft as if she were plucking leaves off fruit. A small nail went flying past me and bounced off the side of a Volkswagen Jetta. Sig dropped the plastic accoutrements in a public trash can a moment later and used the haft that was left like a thick cane.

“I don’t know if that turns me on or if I’m worried about your hands being on my tender places now,” I commented.

She smiled a little wider this time even though her mouth was still tight. “Did you have a particular tender place in mind?”

“Would you believe me if I said my heart?” I asked.

She laughed, just for a second. “No, but you get points for trying.”

Hold on. We were on a points system?

Before I could ask for clarification, the bhut ducked down a side alley. When we reached the opening, we found it filled with a light fog that got denser as the alley got deeper.

“I thought you said this thing didn’t have much mojo left.” Sig’s tone was mild as she twirled her makeshift weapon—its length somewhere between a baton and a Bo staff—in one hand.

“It doesn’t take much to move a few air molecules around.” I listened and took a whiff before adding quietly, “About thirty feet away and bearing left. I think it’s trying to cover its scent by hiding behind a Dumpster.”

In answer, Sig darted into the fog cloud at a run, wielding her new weapon the way a blind man uses his cane, probing, smacking it before her, the feedback of sound and impact helping her chart her way down the alley fast.

I cursed and followed. There was no way I was swinging my katana around in a confined space with limited visibility and Sig, but I still had my silver-steel knife, and I unsheathed it fast. Maybe too fast. My right foot slipped on cold, wet mud, and after a moment’s hesitation, I slid and rolled into it, coating myself from shoulder to shoes in the slush. Somewhere ahead of me, the sounds of wood on bone cracked loudly in the air, and the unnatural mist filling the alley began to dissipate. I rolled onto my feet and saw Sig by a Dumpster, holding the snow shovel haft in one hand and tugging on it. She had crushed the bhut’s throat, and he had ignored the damage and trapped the haft by tucking his chin down over it. Why not? He didn’t have to breathe.

Sig yanked on the stick at the same moment that the bhut broke the haft with the palm of his hand. The sudden lack of resistance caused Sig to stumble and turn slightly, and the bhut kicked her across the alley and into the opposite brick wall, where she lost her footing and fell down.

That’s the problem with taking on the ghosts of lifelong violent souls. The bastards know how to fight.

I came in hard and fast and hammered the hilt of my knife against the bhut’s jaw in a sharp crack of broken bone, and when its head turned, I snapped off a low kick that should have smashed or splintered its knee. Unfortunately, in the heat of things, I’d forgotten the bhut was actually floating just off the ground and not putting weight on that knee. It made it almost impossible to knock the thing off-balance. I had to bring both my forearms up and lean into a block to keep the bhut’s return backhand from lifting me off my feet.

Then the bastard put one hand on the Dumpster beside it and lifted its entire body parallel to the ground in a way that would have been impossible if the bhut’d had more than a passing familiarity with gravity—I threw myself backward to keep those pile driver feet from hammering into me and breaking bone.

It was a desperate move, but I managed to hold on to my knife without stabbing myself and rolled into a crouch just in time to see a heavy manhole lid fly through the air like a Frisbee and half cave the side of the bhut’s skull in. Well, I’d told Sig to find something steel to hit it with.

“Ha!” Sig’s voice was triumphant, and the bhut decided she had a point. I was crouched, and the bhut charged and got past me by running sideways up the alley wall above me, its body at a 45 degree angle to the ground.

I cursed and took an extra second to adjust the katana that was still slung on my shoulders before pivoting and following. The bhut jumped back down to the not-quite-ground and made it out of the alley… where it ran past the sidewalk and headlong into the path of an oncoming box truck—one of the large kind used for hauling furniture. The massive vehicle tried to hit its brakes, but it ran over the bhut with a sound that was half like a thump and half like a thunder burst with some wet thrown in.

Shit.

A slender woman with short curly brown hair and glasses, dressed in jeans and a red all-weather coat, was standing at the entrance of the alley where the bhut had emerged. Her mouth was wide open and her body was stiff with shock. Possibly, the fact that I was covered from head to toe in mud and holding a fourteen-inch knife also had something to do with that.

I pretended to be more winded than I was and put my palms on my knees as I looked at her. “That guy was seriously messed up on something,” I gasped. “Meth, maybe, or heroin. He tried to rob my girlfriend.”

The woman was inching backward carefully when Sig appeared behind me.

“Hey, sweetie,” I greeted. “Are you all right?”

Sig brushed a few strands of hair out of her face. “I’m fine, but that poor man! You should have just let him have my purse!”

“He had this knife!” I exclaimed defensively, gesturing with my blade. “What was I going to do, let him wander off and hurt the next person who came along?”

The woman visibly relaxed a notch or two. I turned slightly to keep the knife’s sheath on my hip hidden.

“What if he’d killed you?!” Sig said angrily. “I can cancel a few credit cards!”

By this point, the truck had ground to a halt and its driver—a large, somewhat beefy man with bad skin and short grey hair and big glasses—jumped out of the cab and left the door open as he dropped to his knees and looked under his vehicle.

I pulled this week’s cell phone out of my pocket with my free hand and checked it. There was no signal, which meant the bhut was still active in the area. The woman was still watching as Sig and I began to walk toward the “accident,” and I called over my shoulder: “The police are going to want to talk to eyewitnesses! You’d better call anyone who’s expecting you and tell them that you’re going to be in a police station for most of the day.”

I had judged her right. The next time I looked over my shoulder, the woman was gone.

“What are we looking for?” Sig murmured.

“A flickering light,” I said grimly, finally sheathing my knife and unzipping the top of my tote bag. Another car appeared, and then another, but both simply went around the halted truck without bothering to see why he’d stopped. The truck driver himself wasn’t paying any attention to us, weeping and cursing while he looked at the thing that was hanging from his truck’s chassis. “My katana is blessed. It should destroy the thing if we can find its true body.”

Or lack thereof.

“Let me handle that part,” Sig told me. “I’ve picked up a few tricks for dealing with disembodied ghosts that don’t involve waving a sword around.”

I didn’t have time to agree. The flickering light we were looking for appeared from beneath the truck. I stepped aside and Sig lunged forward, but the light disappeared into the truck’s exhaust pipe as if sucked up a vacuum nozzle.

What the hell?

The truck started. By itself. I ran forward and yanked the truck driver back off the ground before he was run over by his own wheels, and the truck continued to roll forward, gathering speed. For a second, I thought the bhut was just trying to use its new body to get away, but then I remembered what the bhut had been intent on in the first place.

The pancake house. Kevin Kichida. Molly. Choo. Even if the bhut couldn’t get near Molly, it could aim the truck at Pancakea’s front window like a runaway missile and then depart, letting momentum do the rest.

I tossed my tote bag back toward Sig and kept running. Maybe the bhut had enough control over its truck-body to close the front door that was swinging open, but if it did, it was concentrating on swerving to smash me aside instead. I darted between two parking meters, and the side of the truck swiped into them and sent the short metal poles flying up into the air like launched missiles. I had to jump over the rolling hood of a Fiat that the truck sent tumbling toward me, maybe jumping a little higher than a normal human being technically could. Fortunately, by the time the truck was ready to crush me against the side of a local art museum, I was parallel to the cab. I leaped into the doorway, shouldering the door further open, and when the bhut tried to slam the door shut on my hands, it wound up knocking me into the cab.

It took about four frantic seconds to hook my shoulder under the seat belt strap and click the horizontal part of the belt over my waist, and as soon as I did, the mechanism unlocked again. The door reopened and the truck swerved violently, trying to throw me out the side; only the fact that the truck’s long body wasn’t made for sudden turns saved me. Fucking bhut.

Then the seat belt strap started to pull me back against the seat, the strap slithering over my throat to choke me, but the harness recoiled when it pressed firmly against my mud-covered body. Thank God.

I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, and I’m not sure how to account for what happened next. It may be that the bhut hadn’t gotten full control of its new body yet. It might be that I’m stronger than a normal human and that made the difference. It might have been that the mud my chest and arms were caked in saved me again, or that the bhut only had control over the truck body and gears, not the tires that were touching the ground. Whatever the reason, I managed to wrench the steering wheel into a sudden turn despite its resistance. The truck lurched back into the street and slowly tipped over on to its right side in a skid.

The whole thing was incredibly loud, and I clung to the wheel with one hand and the shoulder strap of the safety belt with the other as my body was yanked violently sideways and down, smacking against the dash. Still, the action kept me from being ground like so much hamburger against pavement and shattering glass and crumpling metal. Shrapnel flew around me in a hailstorm of small notebooks and flashlights and wrappers and cups.

When the truck finally came to a stop several smashed cars and a broken utility pole later, I was fairly certain that the bhut didn’t have enough Jedi juice to lift that massive metal body back on to its side. The bhut apparently didn’t think so, either. The truck’s engine shuddered and gave up its life, and the truck lay there like a big metal beached whale.

I didn’t see what happened next. I was slightly rattled and battered and disoriented—it felt like I’d been trapped inside a giant kettle drum—trying to work my way out of an upturned truck cab quickly and failing. So I didn’t see Sig run up to the truck and wait beside the exhaust. I didn’t see her jab her hand into the center of the flickering lights that emerged and use her index finger to trace some Norse sigil into the bhut’s very core. I didn’t see that disembodied being evaporate into a thousand smaller points of fading light like some kind of cosmic dandelion burst by a sudden wind.

But I hear it was oddly beautiful.

The first thing I did see when I climbed out of the truck cab, ears ringing, bruised and bleeding from multiple cuts and contusions and scrapes, was the front window of Pancakea. Molly was still standing there, though she had been joined by a dozen other customers, Choo and Kevin Kichida among them.

Molly gave me a small wave.