Immortal City

CHAPTER FIVE

Angel Boulevard lay dark and quiet. The palm trees stood motionless. By day it was the city’s biggest tourist attraction, with people from all over the world flocking to the Walk of Angels. At night, though, with its neon signs off and the shops shuttered, this end of Angel Boulevard looked more like an eerie ghost town.

An old man stumbled over the gleaming stars, the streetlights casting looping streaks in his vision. Pockets of people were outside clubs farther down the boulevard, but most everything else shut down at dark, the crowds moving west to the Halo Strip. The man steadied himself against a trash can, then peered in. It was the usual. Angel maps and tourist brochures and fast-food wrappers. If you want to know the character of a people, he always said, look at their trash. He dug his hand down through the garbage until his fingers closed around the smooth, curving surface of a beer can. He pulled it out and leaned back, letting the remains of its contents dribble into his mouth and over his chin. Then he tossed the can back at the trash. He missed and the can rolled across the sidewalk and into the gutter.

He didn’t bother picking it up. If the Angels wanted their boulevard to be clean, he told himself, they could come and do it themselves. They’d be cleaning a long time to get the dirt off this city.

He walked over and sat heavily in the doorway he had picked out for the night. It smelled vaguely of urine, but that didn’t bother him. It was out of the wind, and out of the way of the shop owners and the straggling tourists who would still be walking by. With any luck, he wouldn’t be kicked out tonight. He leaned drunkenly against the doorway and watched the glittering lights of the Immortal City spin around him. He smiled. If you had to be homeless, you might as well be homeless in the glorious City of Angels.

His eyes closed, and before he was even aware of his exhaustion, he fell asleep.

When he woke again, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out, but the boulevard had gone eerily silent. Even at night he could usually still hear the birds in the trees or the occasional stray dog looking for scraps. Tonight, nothing was making a sound. Nothing seemed even to move, apart from the palm trees trembling in the breeze. He sat up and blinked.

Something was wrong.

He was still drunk, that was for sure, but less so now.

He could tell he was coming out of it because he could feel the first twinge of what would be his usual headache. This wasn’t an alcohol-induced paranoia, he was pretty sure; something just seemed. . off. He tried his best to focus his bleary eyes and looked around.

He saw only darkness. Nothing. But something was definitely wrong. He didn’t know it consciously so much as instinctively. As his eyes searched the dark he was suddenly reminded of something he hadn’t thought about in years.

Even decades. He remembered being a kid and being afraid of the dark. That’s what it was. It was a feeling. A feeling coming from the dark itself. The night around him seemed to be full of a feral, primitive presence, a gnawing, sweating animal instinct, like fear itself.

Then he heard the breathing and realized he wasn’t alone.

“Hello?” he said nervously.

Someone was out there. In the dark.

“Is someone there?”

There was no response, but the breathing continued.

A deep, rattling respiration. His eyes looked around wildly.

Then he saw it.

Even at his drunkest, he could never have imagined something so horrific. He opened his mouth, and the boulevard filled with the echoes of his screams.