Blind Shrike Read online

  Blind Shrike

  Richard Kadrey

  Novel published by Richard Kadrey on The Infinite Matrix; this was an early version of Butcher Bird.

  A very entertaining science fiction story. With the help of a blind swordswoman, tattooed Spyder begins a gleefully dark journey from the alleys of San Francisco to the depths of Hell, from the Bardo Lounge to the Bardo Realm…

  Richard Kadrey

  BLIND SHRIKE

  “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.”

  —Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart

  ONE

  Auto da Fé

  “They say that when your head gets chopped off, it can still see and hear for a few seconds, so I’ll have to go with beheading,” said Spyder Lee to Lulu Garou.

  Spyder Lee was drinking shots of Patron Añejo tequila with Lulu, his business partner, at the Bardo Lounge just off Market Street in San Francisco.

  Lulu looked into her empty glass and thought for some time, took a drag of her Marlboro Light and winked at the woman tending bar. “Being beaten to death,” said Lulu. “Badly. I don’t mean like with a baseball bat or rebar so you’re out cold, but something small.” She crushed out her Marlboro in the ashtray the bartender slid in front of her. “An eight ball in a sweat sock. That’d give your killer a good workout.”

  “Not if the guy hit you in the head right off,” said Spyder.

  “My mama was pretty free with her hands. I’m a faster ducker,” Lulu replied. She grinned. Spyder could tell she was unimpressed with his argument.

  “Burning at the stake,” he said.

  “Drawn and quartered,” Lulu countered.

  Rubi, the bartender, took their empty glasses away. “Exactly what are you two rattling about?”

  “Worst ways to die,” said Spyder. “Being covered in honey and staked out on a red ant hill.”

  “Dying of thirst. Like right now,” said Lulu.

  Rubi slid her hand across the bar and took hold of Lulu’s left pinkie. “You parched, baby?”

  “I’m drier than Candy Darling’s cunt.”

  “Candy Darling was a man,” said Spyder.

  “Exactly.”

  Rubi leaned forward and kissed Lulu’s pinkie. “I’ll get you both another round. On me.” As she left to make their drinks, Lulu called after her, “That ain’t all that’s gonna be on you tonight.” Rubi stuck her tongue out at Lulu.

  “Being crucified. That’s supposed to be horrible,” said Spyder.

  “You’re only saying that ’cause that’s how they talk about it in movies. You ever known anyone who was crucified? Or even heard of one? Hell no. Maybe being crucified is great. Maybe it’s a fucking hoot. Maybe it’s a blow job and ice cream on your birthday.” Lulu took out another Marlboro Light and lit it with a pink fur Zippo. “Know what would really suck? Being force fed a bucket full of black widows.”

  Spyder made a face, half frown and half smile. “Jesus, girl,” he said.

  “You’re upping the ante on me.”

  It was the end of another day at the tattoo studio and piercing parlor Spyder and Lulu ran together. Spyder did the ink while Lulu handled the metal. It was a pleasant business. It let them both pretend to be artists while making money and getting a lot of tail on the side. Rubi, for instance, had been one of Lulu’s earliest and most regular customers.

  “She’s got about five pounds of me all over her all the time,” Lulu liked to tell friends.

  Rubi bought back their drinks and set them on the bar. “What time you getting off tonight?” asked Lulu.

  “Early,” said Rubi. “’Bout an hour.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Being eaten alive, Night of the Living Dead-style,” said Spyder.

  Lulu turned to him. “You mind? We’re having a moment here.”

  “Wait, better than that,” Spyder went on. “Being starved to death, but given topical anesthetic and surgical equipment, so the only way you could stay alive’d be to amputate your own limbs and eat them.”

  Rubi said, “You two ought to get married. Move into the Bates Motel.” She went down the bar to serve other customers.

  “Now you ruined our surprise,” Spyder called after her.

  Lulu took a long pull on her tequila. “Flayed alive and drowned in pickle brine.”

  Spyder looked at his hands. The back of one was covered in an intricate black tribal snake pattern while the other hand sported a cartoon red sacred heart. MANS RUIN was tattooed across the knuckles of both hands. He’d gotten the letters while doing a year in reform school for car theft. They were bullshit tats. Kid stuff. But they marked a period of his life, so he never bothered to have them lasered off. From his neck to the tops of his feet, Spyder Lee was an explosion of images and pigments. He’d never felt normal until he’d been tattooed for the first time. The ink felt like some kind of magic armor. His tattoos, even the stupid ones, made him feel bullet-proof.

  He was one of those lanky Texas boys you see working on cars in oil-stained driveways, a cooler full of Coors, his only concession to the summer heat. A perpetually messy mop of black hair and long arms covered in grease working on the transmission of a vintage Mustang of questionable ownership.

  “Split open, your organs torn out with hooks and replaced with red hot coals,” he said.

  Lulu leaned in close. “Strapped to the front of a burning boat and driven through a mile and a half of electrified razor wire in a Tabasco sauce hurricane.”

  They both broke up in drunken laughter, spitting and slamming their hands on the bar.

  “You’re both wrong,” said a woman sitting to Spyder’s right. He and Lulu turned to look at the woman. She was small, with fine features and the smooth grace of a dancer. The woman was drinking red wine and was wearing sunglasses. In her right hand she held a white cane, the sort used by the blind.

  Lulu called over Spyder’s shoulder, “Okay Stevie Wonder, what’s the worst way to die?”

  The woman finished her wine and stood up. “To be betrayed by the one you love.”

  She turned on her heels and swinging her cane in small arcs in front of her, pushed her way through the crowd and out of the bar.

  Spyder watched the door as it closed behind the woman. Lulu took a drag off her Marlboro. “Stupid bitch,” she said and dropped the butt into the woman’s empty wine glass.

  TWO

  The Great Divide

  The Earth was born in a furnace. When the world grew strong enough, it crawled into the dark void to cool and heal itself. Soon, however, it grew too cold and shivered with ice.

  The Earth looked around and found a small star to warm it up. Deciding it liked the neighborhood and the climate, there the Earth stayed.

  Life appeared across the Earth, splashed in the water and glided on thermals through the sky. It didn’t take life long to grow so abundant that it began preying on itself.

  Crows, bats and eagles, the lords of the air, scooped up fish from the seas and dumped them in the desert until the dry lands were piled high with their bones. These carcasses became the Earth’s first mountains.

  Other animals learned to climb the trees and attack the birds as they hunted for food. The land dwellers decorated the bare trees with the birds’ feathers and painted the ground with their blood. The gray earth suddenly had color.

  Every creature who lived in the sea—the fish, the whales, the seals, the crabs, the squids and the rays—met in the South Seas and beat their fins, claws and tentacles, and raised an enormous tidal wave. The wall of water shot across the earth, drowning millions of the land and air beasts. This is how the many rivers and oceans of the world were born.

  After an eon or two of mass murder, when the surface of the Earth was a stinking slaughter house, the lords o
f the different realms of life met at the ancient human city of Thulamela to see if they could end the butchery. This wasn’t all that simple, since the many different creatures of the Earth were going to have to live on the same planet, but give each other plenty of room.

  They divided the world into three Spheres, with each Sphere being invisible and out of the reach of the others. Humans and the most numerous animals of the land, sea and air were given one Sphere.

  A second Sphere was home to the rarest creatures—the phoenix, selkies, vampires, barbegazi, corrigans, tengus, lamias, rompos, sylphs, gorgons, volkhs, wyverns, trolls and other exotic beasts.

  The last realm was left to the most glorious and dangerous inhabitants of the planet: angels and demons.

  So it was that each of these groups lived and grew old and died in its own Sphere, inhabiting the same time and space as all the other Spheres, but rarely touching—unless a creature was powerful or clever enough to learn the spells of crossing over. Because the town meeting that divided the world had taken place in a human city, cities became the places where the creatures who moved from Sphere to Sphere would meet up to talk, joke, eat, exchange spells and news, make love or commit the occasional genocide.

  Over the next few thousand centuries, the creatures who dwelled in the second and third Spheres struck a kind of détente. Unfortunately for the beasts of in the first Sphere (which included ninety-nine percent of humanity), they forgot about the other Spheres completely and only glimpsed them in their dreams.

  Or so they thought.

  THREE

  Strange Attractors

  Later, Spyder went out the back and into the alley behind the Bardo Lounge for a quick piss.

  It wasn’t Spyder’s habit to urinate in public, but at the best of times the Lounge’s toilets were questionable. Sometime during the day, Rubi told him, they had committed Hara kiri. “One summer during college I was trekking in Nepal,” Rubi said. “First night out we came to this little village and I asked this lady who ran the local teahouse where the toilets were. In Nepali she said, essentially, ‘Anywhere but here,’ and pointed to an open field.”

  As Spyder unzipped in the alley, he consider the club’s name and wondered if the real afterlife would be at all like this. A tab at your favorite bar. Pretty girls to chat up. The occasional piss in an alley next to God’s own dumpster. It didn’t seem like the afterlife would be too bad a place. Spyder wondered who the bouncer in the Bardo Realm would be. The Black Bhairab, he decided. Shiva’s most wrathful form. The six-armed, crown-of-skulls-wearing Mad Max of the afterlife.

  Spyder zipped up and turned to reenter the club. Like a bad dream, the Black Bhairab was right there beside him. Something big enough, strong enough and wild enough to be the Black Bhairab, though Spyder knew that these qualities were also present in most of your dedicated crackheads, Spyder. This particular crackhead grabbed Spyder by the front of his shirt and lifted him off him feet, tossing him into the trash cans and empty liquor boxes at the back of the alley.

  Stunned, Spyder reached for his cash, hoping this would get the guy to back off. The mugger came up and slammed his boot into Spyder’s midsection, then kept kicking, even after he’d snatched the money from Spyder’s hand. Spyder didn’t even get a decent look at the guy and that really bothered him. He wanted to see the face of the man who was about to kill him.

  As if the mugger had heard Spyder’s thoughts, he felt himself being pulled up by his collar until he was standing upright. Then Spyder’s feet lifted from the dirty alley floor and he hung limp in the air at the end of the mugger’s arm. “You know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow,” Spyder croaked as he hung there. He punched the crackhead as hard as he could. The guy’s face gave as if there were no bones in there, just a lot of flesh-colored pudding.

  The mugger’s face began to change. His skin crawled in the jittery sodium light from a street lamp. The mugger’s eyes swelled and burst from their sockets, black and glittering with facets. His lips seemed to melt, drawing down into a long, twitching tube. Cracked, curved horns burst from the sides of his head. The mugger exhaled a fetid cloud of steaming breath. Spyder’s brain was on overload. The adrenaline rush and oxygen-deprivation had him flashing on a frantic stream of schizophrenic data. Snakes. Insects. Wolves. Angels. The mugger had a smell. Overwhelmingly sweet. Vanilla roses. Rotting fish. The perfume of dead school girls. Spyder thought of his room in high school. He’d had a poster on the wall, a parody of the kind of out-of-date Civil Defense instructions they used to give kids in case of nuclear attack. The last line had read, “Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.”

  Spyder vomited on the mugger’s arm. The puke seemed to have some kind of mysterious juju power because at that moment the mugger’s head sheered off and rolled to the alley floor. His body, which still had a solid grip on Spyder’s collar, follow a second or two later.

  When he could open his eyes, Spyder saw a pair of shiny vinyl boots in front of his face. He closed his eyes again, ready for this new intruder to finish him off.

  “Get up,” came a woman’s voice.

  Spyder looked up and saw the blind dancer he and Lulu had spoken to in the bar earlier that night. She was holding a long and bloody sword in her hands.

  “I’m tapped out. The dead guy got all my money,” said Spyder.

  “I’m not mugging you, fool. I’m saving you. Not that you deserve it.” The blind woman reached down for Spyder’s arm and helped him to his feet.

  “Thanks. What the fuck just happened?”

  “A Bitru demon attacked you. I killed it.”

  “I don’t believe in demons.”

  The woman nodded. “All right. It was a junkie with the head of an insect and possessing superhuman strength.”

  “Okay,” Spyder croaked.

  Spyder looked at the body at his feet. He hadn’t been hallucinating. The body wasn’t even vaguely human.

  “What the fuck… Why would a demon want me?”

  “A Bitru doesn’t just drop by for blood and crumpets. He doesn’t come unless he’s called.”

  “I did not call any goddam bug monster thing to kick my ass. I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “You must have his mark on your body. Near your heart,” said the woman. She ran both sides of her sword across the demon’s body, cleaning the blood from the blade. Planting the tip of the sword on the ground, she gave it hard shake. The sword blurred and when she stopped shaking, it had transformed into the white cane she’d had earlier.

  “Damn.” Spyder opened his shirt and looked at his chest. “I have a lot of ink on me. Geometrics. Tribal work. Religious geegaws.”

  “Any runes or symbols?”

  “A shitload.”

  “And do you know the meanings of all those runes?”

  “’Course. Some. In a Trivial Pursuit kind of way. They’re just designs.”

  “So says the man covered in demon blood.” The woman moved closer to Spyder. “Did it ever occur to you that those symbols have meaning and power?”

  “Where? How? I’ve done a thousand tattoos like that on people.”

  “Some of them are probably going to have a dream date like the one you just had.” She laid her hand over his heart. “You don’t believe in demons, but you believe in magnetism, right? These symbols you put on your body, like the Bitru’s sigil, these are a kind of magnetism. You don’t have to understand how they work. The demons do.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Take it off. Change it. All the signs and symbols that you don’t know.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Spyder.

  The woman took her hand from his chest. “Most people just call me Shrike.”

  “Thank you, Shrike.”

  She ran a hand lightly over Spyder’s cheeks and jaw. “Good thing you’re pretty. You’re not the quickest little pony on the track, are you?”

  “You underestimate me,” said Spyder. “This was all my
clever plan to meet you. I think it went pretty well.”

  “Take care of yourself,” Shrike said, moving back toward the mouth of the alley.

  “My name is Spyder,” he called to her.

  “Take care of yourself, Spyder.” She waved without turning around.

  “Wait. Do you have a phone number or email or something? I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “But I’m madly in love with you and stuff.”

  She turned gracefully and continued walking backwards, never breaking stride. “Not the quickest pony at all.”

  She was gone. Spyder started after her, but when he tried to take a step, his legs shook so much that he fell against the alley wall. A few minutes later, Lulu came outside looking for him. She helped him back into the Bardo Lounge. Spyder noted that Lulu didn’t seem to notice the large dead demon lying nearby in the alley. Together, Spyder and Lulu got very, very drunk.

  FOUR

  Traffic Jam

  It was light out when Spyder woke up, but his eyes refused to focus, so he couldn’t read the time on the Badtz-Maru clock-radio near the bed.

  His head felt as if someone had scooped out his brains and filled his skull with broken glass and thumb tacks. When he tried to sit up, every part of his body ached. He rose slowly to his feet and walked stiffly to the bathroom. Spyder’s shoulder throbbed and when he switched on the bathroom light he saw why.

  There was a long gash running across his shoulder and down his chest. He had a black eye, a swollen lip and his arms and ribs were spotted in livid purple bruises. Spyder remembered the scene in the alley. It wasn’t a dream. He had been mugged.

  Blood from the gash had dried on his skin, gluing part of his white wife-beater to his chest. Spyder stood under the hot shower until the blood softened and the water soothed his knotted muscles.