Free Constantine by John Shirley, Kevin Brodbin

letters it said, To Buy A New Chevy.
    Constantine had to chuckle. Even as he wondered if the billboard had been put there to mock him - by some enemy who knew he was dying.
    With anyone else, wondering something of that kind would be paranoia. Mental illness. Not with Constantine.
    “Hey,” said the man in the gas station booth behind him, in a Pakistani accent. “You don’t please to smoke in gas station.”
    Constantine walked past the pumps to the sidewalk, where an orange flashing road barricade was set up next to a small gap in the concrete. Someone had been repairing a pipe. He looked at the flashing orange light and smiled, thinking of a time when he was young, still in college, and he’d swiped one of those things and brought it home, to flash and flash perpetually in his living room. He’d watched the light strobing for days, whenever he was home, waiting for the battery to run down. It had lasted a long time: flash flash flash flash… like a heartbeat. But eventually it’d stopped… like a heartbeat.
    He shook his head. It was hard not to think about dying.
    He’d gotten some sleep. Had just a little hair of the dog. Eaten some soup. Now mostly he felt numb. As he lit the cigarette, a couple crows flew by, low as if coming in for a landing; make that three, now five or six. And look at that, another rat. A real menagerie out here. What next, frogs?
    Yep. There it was: a frog jumping by.
    “Huh,” Constantine said. Thinking about having one more drink.
    A frog? But it was the crab crawling by that got Constantine’s attention.
    “Hey, buddy, you got a light?”
    Constantine turned to see a man silhouetted against the light from the gas station. Unlit cigarette butt angling into the light.
    The man coughed. “We gotta stick together, right?”
    Constantine drew astral light into himself as he approached the man, taking a matchbox from his coat pocket. There was a strange scent off the man - many mingled scents…
    Constantine started to proffer the matchbox - then he shook it, hard, between himself and the stranger. The box jumped and vibrated in his hand and a high-pitched warbling screeched from inside it - too loud for so small a source. The stranger reacted instantly, staggering back two steps, his entire body quivering.
    “Ugh - stop it! They…”
    Constantine was sure now - the screech beetle Beeman had given him confirmed it - but he knew a moment too late. The stranger leapt at him, a single bound like an astronaut on the moon, carrying him seven feet over the asphalt to knock Constantine back with a swipe of one reeking limb.
    The dark man’s coat fell open, revealing that his body and face were an illusion, a shape hooked together of hundreds of small creatures: living rats and insects, poisonous snakes and frogs and crabs and scorpions, each a puzzle piece, all held squirmingly together, Archimboldo- like, in the outline of a man.
    Constantine scrambled backward from the demon, inches from its outstretched grasp - its fingers of scorpion’s tails. He shook the matchbox again, making the beetle screech even more loudly. The demon cringed - and its body fell apart, for a moment, the creatures tumbling away from one another, the thing’s clothing flopping to the ground.
    They slunk and scampered in circles, then coalesced, almost instantly hooked up again, like tumblers making a human pyramid, becoming a manshape.
    “Nice trick,” Constantine said hoarsely. Wondering desperately if he could outrun this thing.
    What passed for the demon’s other hand snapped out and wrapped around Constantine’s wrist: a hand of rats and snakes.
    Constantine backpedaled, stumbled, recovered, ending on his haunches with the demon looming over him. A crab ran down the creature’s arm, up onto Constantine’s wrist, to come snapping toward his face; it was followed by tarantulas and rats, running up Constantine’s neck and onto his head.
    Constantine managed not to scream and shook the matchbox violently