Читать книгу Kitty & Cadaver - Narrelle M Harris - Страница 8

‘Six days.’ Sal’s accent – English undercut faintly with an older accent from Goa – thickened with anger. The fact that he couldn’t seem to get his teeth unclenched wasn’t helping. ‘Six days to be ready to perform, without a lead singer, a lead guitarist or a keyboard player. Without half our band.’ The way he said it, it sounded like he was being asked to play without half his heart, which was much closer to the truth.

‘We’ll work it out,’ Laszlo assured him. ‘I’ve seen you do much more with much less.’

Sal’s brown eyes blazed. ‘Not with much less of the fucking band, you haven’t. Alex and Kurt are dead. How much less do you think we can be and still function?’ He loomed over the older man, his dark skin flushing with emotion. ‘We can only perform so many miracles. Raising the dead isn’t one of them. That is the actual opposite of our job.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ Laszlo demanded. ‘You said we needed to be very far away. This is very far away. I’m sorry Alex and Kurt are dead, but I’m not the one who killed them.’

‘You sure as hell didn’t save them,’ Sal snarled.

Yuka pushed her slender body between the two men. Neither of them made the mistake of thinking that because she was small she wasn’t strong. She could probably have broken at least one of them in thirteen places with only her left hand and a well-aimed drum stick.

Laszlo, in fact, had seen her perform a similar feat against the undead in that factory in Budapest, so when she glared at the two much taller men, Laszlo did the sensible thing. He took a step away, dropping his gaze to his feet. ‘Sorry, Yuka.’

Sal had backed off fractionally, his expression mutinous, his eyes glittering bright. He transferred his glare to Yuka.

She glared right back, her accent clipped and firm. ‘Laszlo is not the enemy.’

A shudder ran through him. Sal closed his eyes and the glittering brightness in his eyes escaped in wet tracks.

‘I know. Sorry, Laszlo.’

‘And I, Sal.’ Laszlo managed to tilt an awkward smile at Sal. He felt bad that it had spiralled out of hand so quickly. They were new to each other, Laszlo and the others. One week acquainted, when Alex, Kurt, Sal, Yuka and Steve had been a team for years. When three of them were still mourning their murdered friends.

Laszlo is not the enemy, Yuka had said. It made him… he didn’t know. Sad. Determined. Afraid.

I am not the enemy, he told himself firmly, I never was.

That felt like a lie.

I never will be again.

There. That felt more like a true thing.

The sound of Steve clearing his throat garnered everyone’s instant attention. If their bass guitarist – the eldest of their group at nearly sixty and the most experienced in both battle and loss – had something to say, everyone was going to listen.

‘You know,’ Steve said in his slow drawl. ‘We can do it as a three piece if we have to. You can sing lead and play lead guitar, Sal, you’ve done it before.’

‘I…’

‘Ain’t no disrespect to them that’s gone. It’s wrong Alex and Kurt ain’t here, but that ain’t no-one’s fault but the fang-faced bastards what killed ‘em. We got guitars and drums. We got singers. We can do this.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘It’ll have to be. Hey, Laszlo,’ Steve nodded at the Hungarian. ‘You played a mean fiddle when we needed you. You told Alex you used to play.’

Laszlo’s left hand twitched involuntarily. ‘A long time ago.’

‘Reckon you can learn some songs in a week?’

Laszlo shrugged, the gesture disguising the thrum of excitement that travelled from his heart to his fingertips. ‘Yes. If you need.’

‘We need, and it’ll be a lot easier to pick up the melodies when you’re not trying to slay vampires at the same time, I promise you.’

Laszlo snorted a wry laugh. ‘Oh, but it’s so motivational.’

‘I can give you motivation,’ Yuka said. Laszlo couldn’t tell if she was joking. She grinned, somewhat savagely, which was not enlightening.

Steve’s mouth twitched smile-ward and he settled back into his previous taciturn calm, hip hitched on the corner of the small table in their dorm room. They were short on funds – nothing new there – so the four of them were sharing a room at a backpackers’ joint at the north end of Melbourne. Beds were covered in duffel bags and instruments. A small, battered metal chest was shoved between two of the bunks.

‘You teach Laszlo the songs,’ Yuka told the band. ‘I will get food.’

With that, Yuka patted her belt, checking that her drum sticks were held in place, and left them to it.

She checked her reflection in the hostel’s foyer window, satisfying herself that she was neat enough to venture into public. ‘Foyer’ was putting it grandly. The shabby sofas, chairs and tables were filled with a scattering of equally shabby travellers, and the battered reception desk, jammed to overflowing with brochures and notices, boasted a perky and chaotic receptionist festooned with piercings and bold tattoos.

Yuka wasn’t tattooed – she’d left the inking to Kurt all these years. Only her earlobes were pierced, and they remained unadorned at present. She had the slightly misshapen once-torn ear to prove that wearing too much embedded jewellery while battling an armed and armoured mermaid, for example, could be a very bad idea.

What Yuka did have were her wrist cuffs and the necklace; her mementos of the dead. Her leather wrist cuffs were decorated with the parts of smashed drums, keyboards and guitars she had retrieved over a decade ago – all that was left of her first band.

She fingered the chunky necklace, made of the strings of Alex’s guitar and keys from Kurt’s keyboard. The weight of it around her neck was like the weight of them in her heart. Yuka’s grief was heavy but her anger held her up. Her rage had been helping her to carry grief for 15 long years.

Enough. Food now. Rehearsal later. They would take their respite while they could by simply playing music that was music and not a weapon, and decide how next to move. They were no longer Rome’s Burning. Alex had forged that band when he’d become its leader a decade ago. Alex was gone and they needed a new leader, and with that leader would come a new name. That had been the system for hundreds of years.

The drummer’s short, fast stride took her away from the hostel and to the dying activity of the Queen Victoria Markets, in the final phases of closing up for the day. Her plan had never been to do any actual shopping. For that sort of thing, she needed actual money. They had some, of course, but everyone became adept over the years at not spending it unless absolutely necessary.

Yuka walked through the undercover section of the markets that traditionally housed the fruit and vegetable stalls, redolent with the scent of overripe bananas, citrus and cabbage. Abandoned boxes not yet collected for disposal held discarded produce, more or less edible but not strictly saleable. Yuka found some plastic bags and, keeping her movements swift but unobtrusive, filled them with salvageable refuse. The overripe, split tomatoes would make a good base. A couple of broken carrots; a chunk of cauliflower; a bruised eggplant: a beggar’s feast right there. A half-smashed watermelon would pass for dessert.

Down the road apace was a supermarket. She’d be able to find rice there, oil, spices. There’d be enough for dinner, at least. Yuka was just wondering if she might splurge on a few fillets of chicken when she felt it. The movement, under her feet.

Like pins and needles, but on a string, wound around her feet and wriggling. The pins and needles were tugging her to the east.

Yuka’s toes curled inside her shoes, but the sensation didn’t go away. Her toes tingled. Her arches, too. Everything still felt like it was pulling to one side. Even the weight of her necklace seemed to have a magnetic drag to the east.

Not good.

She spotted a grey granite marker on the opposite corner of the street. East. She followed the tug in her aching feet to investigate.

A plaque in the footpath told her that these markets and adjoining car park had been built on top of an old 19th century cemetery, and that only 914 of the interred had been exhumed and reinterred elsewhere by 1922. Many, many more dead must have been buried here in the eighty years of the cemetery’s use.

The tingle-pull in her feet was strong here, though not malevolent. Nevertheless, Yuka could tell that the dead underneath the car park were restless.

Yuka’s sigh was in part long-suffering resignation, in part annoyance, and another part determination. She crossed the mostly empty street to the even emptier car park and began to walk it, the intensifying tingle in her feet like thin ropes moving along and over her arches, heels, the balls of her feet.

These dead are long decayed, Yuka reminded herself. They are not going to burst out of the earth in a zombie parade. There will not be enough tissue to hold the bones together. There are no minds under the tar, only bones remembering they used to be alive. They have probably been rolling over in their sleep for a hundred years and no-one’s ever noticed before.

Yuka was reluctant to put the scavenged meal on the ground – the restless dead had been known to rot food through proximity before – so she tied the plastic bags together and draped them around her neck. Watermelon to the left; vegetables to the right. A balanced diet. Ha. The strong odour of overripe plant life rose around her face.

Hers, Yuka reflected, was not a dignified life.

She crouched and put one hand on the asphalt, letting the ropey tingle move over her fingertips and palm. There was no malice in the sensation. The dead weren’t angry, though she sensed a frisson of longing. That might be the component parts of the dead remembering what it was to be whole and alive.

Yuka crouched and patted the ground. Patpat. Patpat. Patpat. A little hushing rhythm. The restless tingle hesitated then resumed.

Yuka pulled the drum sticks from her belt. The asphalt was not going to do the sticks one bit of good. Well, that’s why she had lots of drum sticks, she reminded herself, and why she went to the effort of singing every new set strong: for emergencies like this. Besides, although she was on her own, Yuka didn’t think the whole band was needed. Her drum sticks and her voice should be enough. Bartos, of revered memory, had achieved more in one cruel hour on the River Somme with merely a rusty horseshoe, a tent peg and his own baritone.

Balanced on the balls of her feet, Yuka began to drum a tattoo on the ground. Taptap, taptap. Taptap, taptap. The rhythm of a heartbeat. It wasn’t an ancient piece, but it had been over fifty years in the band’s repertoire – the song was 20 years older than Yuka – so it had a proven record. And these bones under her feet were old and not really a threat. All she had to do was send them back to sleep.

Asleep

The dust

And all

Your bones

Lay down

She knew the words in Japanese as well, but sometimes the magic was stronger when sung in the composer’s original words.

There’s no

Place here

For you

To go

Lay down

The heartbeat rhythm had the attention of the dust and bones. The taptap, taptap brought all that restlessness into focus. Yuka could feel it, almost like the dust had eyes, and all of them only for her.

Almost imperceptibly at first, Yuka slowed the heartbeat. Taptap, taptap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

You’re old

The world

Won’t know

You now

Lay down

Lay down

Lay down

The things under her feet grew sluggish. She could feel them remembering not only the heartbeat, but how the heartbeat fades. Yuka could feel the dust and bones calming, settling. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap tap. Tap tap.

Be dust

Be bones

They were going back to sleep, forgetting they had ever once been alive.

Tap. Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Be gone

Be gone

Lay.

Down.

Yuka held the silence after the last note, breathing as silent as a tree, and listened with her ears and heart and feet and hands.

There. Quiet in the graveyard. Much better.

The spike when it came was so quick that Yuka didn’t feel it until it hit – a sharp jab, like an electric shock, jolting out from the earth. This burst of rage wasn’t something from the restless dead. It came from something deeper; something she hadn’t sensed as she sang. It burned up from the ground, across her feet, into the tips of her drum sticks on the asphalt.

But Yuka was an old hand at this, and though surprised, she was not unprepared. Her sticks had been sung to might and potency. Her voice was in the wood, but so was Steve’s, so was Sal’s, so were Alex and Kurt’s, binding that wood and making it powerful, even if not impervious.

As the burn of that unanticipated wrath arched between the ground and her skin, Yuka felt it, raised her sticks and punched them down, tips first, not beating but stabbing into the shell of tar and, through it to the soil below. The jolt of power pierced the sticks, but with the magic in her body and in her tools, she met it, blocked it, threw it back.

A force like two concussion waves meeting and rebounding threw Yuka onto her back. She lay there, gasping for air, feeling the ground with her whole body. She pressed her skull, shoulders, spine, thighs, calves, heels, to the asphalt. With her palms flat to the asphalt, the bags of groceries over her chest and sagging against her throat, she listened with every cell. She looked like a bag lady committing some sort of extreme yoga.

The whole, quiet ground. Whatever had attacked her was gone.

Yuka got to her knees, her joints creaking. The bags of dinner-in-waiting draped over her shoulders were slightly less intact than before. She half crawled to where her sticks were buried in the tarmac and, with effort, she pulled them free. The tips and necks were shredded, the shafts split. Damn. She’d lost her strongest set of sticks in Budapest, and now these were ruined. They’d just have to spare the cash for new ones.

Yuka adjusted the bags across her aching neck with her numb fingers and proceeded with the shopping. She decided to buy the chicken anyway. The restless dead happened all the time. Actual meat protein for dinner was much less common.