Blind Shrike | Page 3

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