“I am not,” Keif said fiercely, “going to whitewash my own art -”
“You’ve got to, or you’ll go to jail. We can’t clean up the whole city by ourselves,” I said. “We can’t. We’ve got to tell the police. I can keep your name out of it, but my pull won’t help if your tags are plastered all over the city while you’re hanging at Michael C. Carlos.”
“Aw, shit,” Keif said, face strained. “Damnit, we shouldn’t have taken that show.”
“What? No,” Drive said, leaning against the doorframe. “ You gotta clean up your act.”
“Yeah,” Keif said, hunched over so far his dreads flopped forward. “I’ll think about it-”
“You’ll think about it?” Ranger said, standing, tossing her Coke in the sink. “I’m gonna get evicted or arrested or killed because your shit is burning up our home? Hell no. You’re not going to think about it-you gotta clean it up starting now!”
“Yeah, sure,” Keif said-and then glanced up in surprise to see all three of the rest of us standing. “You mean, like right now?”
“Like now now,” I said. “The tagger moves fast.”
Keif got to his feet. “All right,” he said. “All right. No time like the present, I guess.”
We followed Keif out. He wasn’t the healthiest of boys; he had a distinct penguin wobble and I started to worry he wouldn’t make it. “How far are we going? Should we take my car?”
“Nah, it’s not far, but I gotta run by the studio and pick up my paint,” Keif said, pointing at a door on the opposite side of the white canyon. “And I want to go pick up my camera.”
“Wait. Something’s different,” Ranger said.
I felt mana tingle around me. I whirled, inspecting the scattered pieces of graffiti. At first, I didn’t see anything different; there were some tags, but our tagger hadn’t shown up and sprayed a new masterpiece while I’d been drinking my Coke.
But then my eye caught movement, low and furtive along the warehouse wall. At first I thought it was a mouse or a bug, but then I caught it again, long, spindly, like the shadow of a hand. My eyes didn’t want to see it at first, but then I had a brainflash. This is what it felt like when other people tried to catch my tattoos moving. I tilted my head.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Keif said. “There’s a spreading throwup along the wall!”
A long line of black graffiti slithered along the base of the wall: spidery black shapes, boiling up in waves, a scribbled animation of a swift river running just beneath the edge, only surging up when the dark channel below could no longer contain it.
I started backing up. I saw at once why Keif called it a spreading throwup-simple, fast to ink, and self- replicating-but it wasn’t just mold-powered graffiti. Maybe that factored into it, but there was no way that long, narrow rivulet of hate could generate that much power from that little surface area. This had to be a magical receiver: somewhere, folded up in that nasty scribble, something like Cinnamon’s pattern of golden rectangles was receiving power.
“Everyone stay away from the walls,” I said. The graffiti was backing up at each of the doors, bunching up in a squiggle with oddly precise curves and angles before spilling up and around the doorframe or curving around the sill. “We need to move back, take cover-”
“Oh my God,” Ranger screamed. “What the hell is that?”
I looked up, and saw Zipperface stepping out at the other end of the canyon. Even from this distance I couldn’t see how I’d ever mistaken him for human: head too wide, arms too thick, legs too short. He was a walking caricature of a man, grinning and evil.
We faced each other briefly; then he raised his glowing, misproportioned arms and graffiti exploded up the walls. Long thin lines leapt up, curving arcs slid through them, the graffiti wove into itself, creating a grid, then a moire pattern-then filigreed flames.
Zipperface stood there at the center of a spiderweb of graffiti-then he ripped open those metal teeth and belched out a spray of flame which rippled out through the spiderweb, caught along the walls and began screaming towards us, turning the alley into a canyon of fire.
“We’re totally exposed here,” I said, backpedaling towards the door. “Everyone, back inside, let’s go out the back way-”
“Don’t!” Ranger said, tackling me just as I got to the door. We rolled aside just as the flames screeched around us and coiled around the door in a tongue of flame. She grabbed me around the waist and lifted with surprising strength, half pushing, half dragging me away from the entrance and around my car. “There is no back way out!”
“But all the squatters… ” I said, horrified, as the flames roiled around the door, licking out at my car, trying to reach around it to get us. “They’re trapped, we have to get them out.”
“This used to be an arms warehouse,” Ranger cried. “The walls are a foot thick. There’s no way out but the front. Going back in is suicide-oh, Christ, my dog’s in there too-”
“Jesus,” I said. I looked around, ran to A6’s window planter, picked up a pot and hurled it through it through the plate glass window. “Fire! Fire! Everyone out! EVERYONE OUT!”
Ranger grabbed my hand and pulled, jerking me back from the window as fire leapt from the door to the window frame. A window to our left smashed open, a metal towel rack complete with toiletries flying out and scattering on the ground. A naked man, damp with shower water and hair still filled with suds, leapt through and tripped, bright arterial blood spraying out from his leg where the glass cut it. Keif was screaming, holding his hands to his face, a horrible flickering light beaming through his fingers and the seams of his clothes while Drive whapped him with his motorcycle jacket, trying to put it out. The door to A6 opened, and there were screams inside as the fire leapt inside the unit. And then the fire wrapped around my car.
My Prius exploded in a yellow ball of flame, a loud clap hammering my ears an instant after the hot wash of heat stung my face. A yellow fireball roiled up into black smoke, there was the vicious sparkle of evil magic, then the battery caught, fire and magic, blasting the hatch out, slamming into the opposite wall in a blue-white bolt of magic that was half fire, half lightning.
We were knocked back off our feet as broken glass fell from shattered windows up and down the alley. After a dazed moment, Ranger hauled me to my feet and yelled something.
“What?” I said, barely able to hear her over the ringing, the flames, the screams. Then it sank in. “My car! He blew up my car! I should never have called it the blue bomb.”
“Forget it! Get out of here,” Ranger said. “He’s after you! He’ll kill you if you stay. He’ll kill us if you stay! Go now, while the confusion lasts!”
“But the people inside-”
“ I’ll save them,” Ranger said, “if I have to drag them all out myself! You get out of here-go on! Before he catches sight of you again!”
I stared past her into the confusion. Between the smoke, the flames, and the people spilling out into the alley, I couldn’t see Zipperface; ergo, he couldn’t see me. I took one glance into Ranger’s eyes, then turned and ran. In shame, in fear, in hope that I would get away. I ran.
Not just from Zipperface, though; because Ranger was right-and Counselor Lee was right, and even Detective Bonn was right. The worse things got, the more that people would start looking for an easy answer to stop it-and the day I had been freed, in both places the police would know that where I went, the fires restarted.
You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to put two and two together.
The first person the police would look for would be me.
No Safe Haven
I stumbled back to Lee Street and the nearest gas station I could find and called for a cab, then ducked inside the restroom to wash up. God. Whoever was behind Zipperface-he’d killed my car. He’d killed my car and my friends-and he’d almost killed me. Twice now.
My hands were shaking as I splashed water on my face. As the water trickled down, I heard police sirens and fire trucks, and stayed put. Only after someone knocked impatiently on the bathroom door did I nervously slip out
