PART XXIII

Part XXIII


She laughed and poured 'em.

How have you been?

I've been OK. I came to see Bruce.

He's in the back office.

I positioned Carl in the back corner booth so he could watch the front door. The back office was in a covered garage attached to the back of the bar. The place had been a printshop or something a long time ago.

I walked around the bar and passed the dart boards, pushing through the door that led to the back patio. Through another gate to the gravel lot and a hard left brought me to the garage door.

I knocked lightly and entered. Bruce already knew I was coming, his wife had signaled him with a little switch by the register that turned a small 25w red bulb on next to the cooler.

Bruce was waiting for me.

I heared you had a Congregation at your place. You should have let me know.

Bruce was refering to the Reapers. A group of crows is called a murder, and a group of ravens a congress. Well, when Reapers got together in groups, they called it a congregation. The irony wasn't lost on anyone.

You'd have come over there with a case of beer and that little DIY crossbow of yours and sat on my roof raising hell. I didn't want to wake the neighborhood.

Bruce smiled in agreement, then looked off for a bit like he was imagining shooting a bunch of the bastards dead while he slammed PBRs.

So what brings you around Aubrey?

I need some intel.

Well, step into my office.

Bruce pulled hard on the cooler door and we both stepped in. He closed the door behind us and the temperature dropped. We passed the short distance to the back where Bruce reached behind a Keg and pressed the release for the back door, which swung up revealing a sloping staircase. A neon sign came to life, just inside the stairwell, lighting the way. It read:

Fine Weapons
The Right to Buy Weapons
Is the Right to be free

Bruce had stolen it as an homage to F. Paul Wilson and his Repairman Jack novels. It was the same sign Jack's friend and arms dealer, Abe Grossman, has over his secret stairwell in the books. It comes from a libertarian bent Sci-Fi novel, written by AE van Vogt, called "The Weapon Shops of Isher".

The Door closed behind us as we descended into Bruce's office. At the bottom of the stairs Bruce clapped his hands twice and lights came on.

A clapper, Bruce?

Bruce turned to me and smiled, amused.

Yeah, pretty cool huh?

The room looked like any workshop you might see in someone's garage except that almost everything Bruce built was a custom made weapon for killing things that went bump in the night.

The DIY crossbow I'd refereed to was a pneumatic crossbow that cocked itself and replenished the bolts from a clip, just like an automatic, except for the pneumatic bit. It was practically silent. The bolts themselves were custom made. The tips were standard four blade configuration, but had their tips coated with diamond dust and little channels in them so that when they hit, the impact would shatter an ampule of mercury in the shaft and it would be guided it right where it need to go. Mercury killed Reapers deader than Christmas in Sri Lanka.

The thing with Bruce's gadgets though was that he made them more complex than they needed to be. He had a thing for Steampunk, so even The Big Sleep, as he liked to refer to the Reaper crossbow, was tricked out in odd sorts of ways. The compressed air tank was actually two tanks. One was packed with Dry Ice, the other full of pressurized CO2. Every-time you shot a bolt, and it could shoot 40 a minute with each clip holding 80, two things would happen. One, a tiny LED light hidden in old Vacuum tubes would go off, and two, a small puff of white vapor from the bottom dry ice container would come out a little chimney on the top making the whole thing look like it was powered by steam. The canister itself was housed in a polished mahogany backpack sort of thing, with the tubes on top. It was a truly insane thing to watch.

Bruce moved past the tables to the back where he had a bank of 6 really nice 30" Apple flat screens running probably one of the most sophisticated pieces of supernatural tracking software ever conceived. It was truly SOFTware, too.

His three G5s were paralleled and then attached to an older, wetter sort of processor. In the closet next to the machine were two shelves. On each shelf was 3 jars, in each jar was a brain, kept functioning through an odd combination of magic, electrical current, and some sort of zombie tea cooked up by a witch doctor in Haiti. All the brains had belonged to psychics that had once been part of the Russian Army's Occult research during WWII. Bruce had bought them online, one at a time, harvested within seconds of them passing away. Yeah, it was a little beyond me.

The whole thing came to life in an instant. Something about the combined processor power made boot-up nearly impossible to see.

What are we looking for?

My Uncle. I need to know for certain that there's no trace of him on this plane.

Bruce nodded, too much time had passed for condolences.