Free Hellblazer 1 - War Lord by John Shirley Page B

yelp, his back arching. He thrashed on the bed, spurting blood.
    “Jesus!” Gatewood burst out.
    There was a responding pandemonium from below—shouting, a thud, a sputter of gunshots.
    “I got this one, he was going for a gun!” Vintara shouted. He started down the stairs.
    Gatewood went to look at the dying man—gone limp now, his breath coming in fast little gasps.
    There was a neat bullet hole right through the Qu’ran—and beside the bed, something else. Medicine bottles. Gatewood picked one of them up and went to the stairs.
    He was stalling about going downstairs. He could tell by the sounds . . . there was something down there he didn’t want to see. He made himself go down into the living room.
    The soldiers were standing around, staring at the body on the sofa. The boy’s dad was sprawled facedown over the sofa, motionless, the back of his head shot away.
    “He went for the shotgun,” Marquand said. The muzzle of his assault rifle was smoking. “When he heard the shots upstairs . . .”
    “I don’t know—maybe he was going for it,” Binsdale said, shaking his head.
    “Maybe,” Muny said, staring at the body. “Maybe he was just running by the fucking sofa.”
    “What, you want to take a chance, Muny?”
    “Where’s the kid?” Gatewood asked. The boy was nowhere to be seen.
    Binsdale let out a long slow, sighing breath. “Oh—he ran off. When we . . . when Marquand shot his pops.”
    Gatewood shook his head in disbelief. Little kid, alone, his father and uncle dead, running in the darkness of the city . . . of this fucking city . . .
    He looked at the medicine bottle in his hand, then tossed it to Binsdale.
    “What’s this, Gatewood?”
    “Check it out.” Gatewood working to keep the anger from his voice. “The guy upstairs had no gun. He was reaching for a book. That was next to his bed. Haldol. It’s an antipsychotic medicine. Came from our own clinic. The guy was just crazy and scared.”
    “Bullshit, Gatewood!” Vintara spat. “You were trying to say don’t light up that car that time, turned out to be a fucking bomb car! You don’t know dick!”
    Gatewood felt strange . . . very strange . . . like his anger was fading into a kind of numb resignation, and as it happened the room around him was going dark . . . Vintara and Binsdale, the others, their faces sliding into obscurity. The only light was coming from the doorway.
    He turned and looked at the front door. The soldier he’d seen that day, when the guy with the bomb had tried to blow them up at the checkpoint—the ghost soldier—was standing just inside the front door. He gestured to Gatewood, urgently.
    Gatewood walked to the front door, leaving the others to argue about how to report all this. Binsdale wasn’t pleased with any of it. Vintara was saying maybe Gatewood hid that guy’s gun; he’s trying to make them look bad . . .
    Outside, Gatewood found a ghostly multitude awaiting him. It was dark here, but he could see them all quite clearly, as if each was transparent, with a small interior light, the size of a child’s night-light, right where their heart should be, illuminating them from within. The man who’d been shot upstairs was there now, an apparition but no longer looking crazed or scared. Just sort of somber. The ghost of the dad was there, his face profoundly sad, staring out across the city, perhaps looking for his runaway child. The ghost soldier was there, and so was the old Muslim guy with the white beard from that day on the overpass, and dozens of others, a crowd of ghosts, all looking at him solemnly and expectantly. Fourteen, maybe fifteen children amongst them. There were whole families of ghosts here—they’d died all at once, together.
    When he looked at them he seemed to glimpse the deaths that had disembodied them. Blown up by car bombers. Blown up by American bombs. Shot at American checkpoints. Shot by insurgents. Executed by terrorists for cooperating with the Americans. Murdered by