Damn Him to Hell

conditions, it could be contagious. Tim had had a rough life, and I didn’t want to see him hurt. “See if Andre has more cots anywhere.”

“Why can’t we take her to a hospital?” Tim sniffed and wiped his eyes.

Andre folded up the gurney. “Because Acme is covering up the disaster by sweeping everyone into trucks and hauling them to the plant.” He’d removed the hood of his hazmat. His expression was grim and his hair was wet with sweat.

“What—taking them to the plant?” I gaped in horror at the monstrosity of first nuking, then kidnapping the helpless.

Andre tapped my jaw shut. “You said it yourself: we’re guinea pigs. Tim, move the theater seats to the walls, and Julius knows where there are more cots. I have all my men scrambling to pick up bodies as they drop, before Acme can steal them.”

Murderous red rage must have shown in my eyes. Andre didn’t know precisely what I was capable of, but he’d seen my powers flood his bar and allow me to talk to Max in hell. He knew I wasn’t normal. He caught a hank of my overlong hair in his glove and tugged, then leaned over and planted a hot kiss on my cheek that seared my skin.

“Don’t, Clancy,” he purred in my ear while my blood pressure went up in flames. “Whatever you’re thinking, just don’t. We need you to keep Senator Boyfriend on a leash.”

My neglected breasts perked to attention and my libido sparked. Who wouldn’t melt if the sexiest man on the planet expressed concern like that? But no matter how hot Andre might be, I was too smart to fall for his considerable charms. The bastard was simply hoping to distract me, and talking about Dane was a bigger distraction than the kiss.

I resented that all the world thought a slimy U.S. senator was my boyfriend, just because Max in Dane’s body claimed I had saved his life and kept calling me.

I’d saved Max’s soul maybe, but the senator’s was burning in hell, where it belonged. My place in the scheme of things was murky, but I was quite clear that I wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend. I hadn’t had sex in months.

Still, Andre had succeeded in bringing me down from my wrathful cloud enough to realize he was right about leashing Dane/Max. The senator’s conscience would have us shut down, and we’d all starve and go homeless.

I would have to be the one to rein in his righteous huff, but we had more immediate problems. “Can’t we send cops after the body snatchers?”

“The cops think Acme is being generous in offering in-house facilities to a bunch of homeless people with no insurance. You want to tell them otherwise? Keep it cool in here, Clancy. I’ve gotta get back to the street.”

He had a point. The outside world thought we were slimy deadbeat trolls living in a slum. To them, Acme was a shining example of capitalism at its best. In People vs. Corporations, people lost every time.

Leaving Julius and Pearl to clean up the patients and make them comfortable, Tim and I began moving theater seats. Cora found us a while later.

“I told you to stay home,” I said ungratefully as she began hauling benches.

“And I love you, too,” she retorted.

Cora is gorgeous. Tall, voluptuous, with creamy mocha skin stretched over dramatic cheekbones and hair cropped to accentuate the angles, she should have been a model or an actress. Instead, she manned the secretary’s desk at Discreet Detection and produced snakes from thin air. We all have our hang-ups. The Zone’s were just more intriguing than most.

“Yeah, that and three bucks will get me a cup of coffee, for which I would kill right now,” I said. I hadn’t seen a kitchen down here, but I was betting there was one. It just required thinking like Andre to find it.

I didn’t have the time or inclination to kink my mind that badly. I returned to communication central, wishing I knew how to fix things.

Messages had piled up in my absence. I glanced at the clock—past six. I was dead on my feet and about to starve.

Checking online, I saw that the morning news had finally picked up helicopter views of the gas cloud at dawn—a spooky roiling green and pink wide enough to spread over the dead zone by the water and a little way up the hill to the residential area above Edgewater Street, creeping closer to us on the far south side from the plant.

Feeling sick thinking of the little kids living in those tenements on the hill, I turned off the TV and tuned in to the reports feeding directly to me through the computer.

Which was when Frank’s all-caps subject header caught my eye—SARAH.

Shit. I’d hoped she’d stayed home. With trepidation, I clicked the link in Frank’s message.

It opened a video of guys in fancier hazmat than Andre owned loading Sarah onto a stretcher. It was unmistakably Sarah—frizzy bronze hair, torpedo breasts, and hairy chimp hands and feet. She must have passed out mid-change. Normally, when Sarah was startled, she morphed instantly into a chimp.

Fear sank deep into my bones. Acme scientists would take every cell of her body apart to figure out how she did that—one of the many, many reasons we stayed under the radar. If she woke up, she had the potential to damn everyone in sight, even the good guys. Provided there were any good guys. Maybe I should just let Sarah take care of the justice problem for me. . . .

Which brought forth another conundrum—did I go to hell for letting Sarah execute Acme officialdom when I knew she wasn’t qualified to judge fairly? I was beginning to think I needed to live in a hut in the Himalayas to avoid these mind-boggling moral dilemmas.

The disaster was taking on new and deeper proportions, and my head was starting to throb. Milo put his paws on the keyboard and purred at me. Stupid cat. I put him back on the floor and buzzed Andre the video link. Answering a cell phone while wearing gloves is tricky, even if the Zone let him get the message, so I didn’t expect an instant response. But someone had to go after Sarah. I was enough of a coward not to want to be the one.

Light-headed with hunger and fear, I pushed away thoughts of lawyers joining the souls of angry senators in hell. Cora came bearing steaming mugs of coffee and nuked Krispy Kremes from someone’s freezer. In return, I showed her Frank’s video. Her curses were more creative than mine.

“Put your hair back, Medusa,” I chided when her favorite garden snake materialized and wrapped around her toned, bare arm.

Cora nuzzled the snake, then sent him back to whatever dimension he occupied. Two years ago, when I’d first moved to Baltimore, I would have freaked out. After living with roaming Dumpsters and shape-shifting chimps, very little fazes me anymore.

“Where’s Paddy?” she demanded.

“Wandering the streets as usual as far as I know. Why?”

“He’s the only one of us who can get inside Acme. He has to go after Sarah or they’ll have the body snatchers sweeping all of us into their zoo.”

“We belong in a zoo,” I pointed out, but I got her drift, and it wasn’t a pretty one.

History lesson: The brothers Vanderventer created Acme and built it into a wealthy powerhouse. Then they died and left the mess to their frustrated wives. Max’s grandmother had vacated her responsibilities, leaving Paddy’s evil mother, Gloria Vanderventer, gripping Acme with an iron fist. I held Gloria at least partially responsible for Dane’s diabolical involvement in Max’s death. Even so, body snatching was a new low for the woman.

“Does Paddy still have an office at Acme?” I asked. He wasn’t reliable, but he was all we had. I just had to hope he wasn’t evil like his mother and son. Optimism doesn’t become me, so that was desperation speaking.

“Paddy has free rein to wander over there,” Cora said, watching over my shoulder as I opened more messages. “Who knew Bill had an iPhone?”

Hulking bartender Bill had videoed a gray-haired lady with a cane pounding the crap out of an ambulance attendant trying to pick her up off the street. She looked a hundred years old and not more than ninety pounds, but she beat the two-hundred-pound attendant away. Then fainted. She appeared lifeless, but my bet was that she was comatose like the others.

Cora whistled. “That’s some wacky gas.”