I walked away from the piano and approached them. They were dressed like dime store novel goons.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” I asked them, putting myself between them and the bar.
They weren’t pleased that I paid them any mind. No one else did. “We’re looking for someone,” one of them told me.
“Found someone, you have!” I said merrily. They were trying to walk around me, but to their annoyance I moved to block them. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re after? Maybe I can help.”.
“It’s none of your concern,” the other grumbled, and tried to break away from his partner.
I moved in his direction, putting my hand on his chest to stay him. Wow, was his chest firm. He stopped, but only by choice. What the hell was I doing? “Look, buddy, no one could agree with that more than me, but here I am just the same. Now, I’m still having trouble seeing the good guys from the bad guys in this, if there are any of either at all, but you’re either here to stop the Leviathan from being summoned, in which case you’re too late, or you’re here to tie up loose ends, in which case I can’t let that happen until I find out what I need to know. So back off, will ya? This seat’s taken.”
They looked me over with a shock that overcame their outrage. This is the benefit of boldness; if you stand up to a clearly superior opponent, it takes them a minute to work out if you’re stronger than you look or just stupid. The trick is to press that advantage before they make up their mind, which is what I intended to do.
I took a step back and bumped into one of the other patrons, a violin-shaped girl with a dress so tight it was practically sewn-on. She had her back to me, and in a crowd like that just getting bumped wasn’t enough draw your attention. So I grabbed her ass and gave it a long deliberate squeeze.
This, of course, will get anyone’s attention. She whirled around like a clockwork contrivance, her flat palm outstretched to strike. The whole bar was a machine I’d set in motion now, and she was just one of the spinning cogs. I stepped out of the way before she could see who did it and her hand swung towards the first hunter’s cheek. His reflexes were way better than mine, and he caught her wrist before she could connect. I disappeared into the crowd as the next piston fired. Her boyfriend, seeing the altercation, stepped in to defend her with a heavy right hook. The second hunter deflected the blow and the boyfriend’s fist flew into the back of someone else’s head. Except in this particular situation, this is why you should never start a fight in a crowd. The other bystander, who had been standing behind the hunters, turned around to confront them. He drew his fist back to return the blow and accidentally clocked his own girlfriend with his elbow. I wanted to keep watching, but it doesn’t do to get caught up in your own diversion. The bar was a symphony of cause and effect, what looked like chaos was actually an act of perfect precision. Ever play Mouse Trap? That’s what it looked like, with the hunters caught in the middle.
I ran up to the bar, power sliding like a rock star under the trapdoor countertop that gave the bartenders access and pushing past them behind the bar. One of them tried to detain me. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“A duck walks into a bar,” I told her, snatched up a bottle of Southern Comfort and pouring it along the counter as I walked. “He says to the bartender, ‘give me a bottle of whiskey.’” Lilith was a the other end of the bar. I put my arm around her waist and dragged her with me as I went. “The bartender says ‘how do you plan to pay for it?’” I recited, even though the girl who asked the question was no longer listening. I kicked up the trapdoor counter at the other side so we could walk past it (even on a night like this I wasn’t willing to attempt a two-person power slide) and took the invisible man’s lighter out of my pocket. “And the duck says…”
“’Just put it on my bill’,” Lilith finished, then I lit the spilled whiskey. The bar lit up like a barbecue and everyone that had jumped clear when I was spilling liquor in front of them hopped out of their seats and into the growing fray I’d created to stall the hunters.
I picked the whiskey bottle back up, dragging Lilith in front of the bar with me and looking at Barry. “Time to go.”
Barry’s plastic body was burning underneath him and he floated away from it to follow. There wasn’t any point in keeping a low profile now. We went out back onto a catwalk patio that opened up under the night sky. In good weather it was a pleasant place to have a drink, but under these circumstances it was our best chance of escape.
“We need to get to the roof, Barry,” I cried to him, looking back to make sure we weren’t being chased by, well, pretty much everyone.
“How?” he insisted.
As he asked this I picked Lilith up in my arms and stepped up on the railing. “Figure it out!”.
“This is the plan?” Lilith asked, wrapping her arms around my neck.
“Oh shit,” Barry whispered, swooping in towards us as I jumped over the rail.
We started to fall at first, and the wisdom of the idea suddenly failed to impress me. But then, with a clumsy but successful effort, he managed to grab hold of us and shot us up over the gutters and onto the roof. Slinging us onto the roof took all his strength, though, and we landed heavy, like we just bounced off a trampoline into a wall.
“That was the big plan?” Lilith demanded, rolling clear of me. “Burning my bar and jumping off the balcony?”
“Plan might be too strong a word,” I admitted. “But this’ll do.” We made sure we were far enough out of sight that anyone who made it out onto the patio would see no sign of us and, with any luck, figure we’d just magically disappeared. That’s the secret of magic, folks: you bust your ass behind the scenes to make it look like you didn’t do anything at all.
“How do you know they won’t follow us?” she asked.
“Who?” said Barry, who was pretty much oblivious.
“The narwhal hunters,” I told him, explaining nothing.
“What?”
“I don’t think they can follow us,” I told Lilith. “I get the feeling they’re a little out of their element here.”
Barry laughed, and it caught me by surprise. “And we’re not?”
“Like the man said, we don’t belong anywhere right now.” From the rooftop you could see across all of downtown to the river. “Why ....Savannah....? Why does the end of the world start here?”
“....Savannah.... is the world,” Barry said dramatically. I gave him a weird look and he decided to elaborate: “At least to us it is. Whether this affects the world or just us, it doesn’t really matter.”
I took out one of the nightmare man’s cigarettes and lit it. “Then I guess it’s up to us.”
“Us?” Lilith repeated. “I’m not part of us.”
“You are now,” I told her. “Whatever went down between you and the monkey man put this thing in play, and I can’t spend the whole time looking over my shoulder to see what you might be doing. So until this thing is through you’re with me. Congratulations, honey: You just got drafted by the good guys.”
“I’ve missed a lot,” Barry complained. “So we’re the good guys?”
“Best I know,” I told him, which wasn’t saying much. “Until we know what’s going on, we’re the only good guys in this. Which means it’s up to us to fix it before everything goes to Hell.”
“Wow,” Barry mused. “This is all pretty badass!”
“All in a day’s work for a Goddamn superhero,” I agreed.
“Great,” said Lilith. “So what do we do next?”
“Give me a minute, will ya? I’m still takin’ it all in.” To be honest, I usually just let things happen. I didn’t have much experience making them happen. But Barry was right: ....Savannah.... was my world, and I wasn’t about to let it go tits-up on my watch, not if I had anything to do about it.
That meant finding the connection between the weird things I’d been seeing lately, tracking down the people responsible, and setting the whole thing right before it was too late.
“First thing we need to do is get off this roof, I guess,” I said to them, beginning with the obvious because it’s all I had to work with.
“It’s a start,” Lilith chuckled. “Any ideas?”
“Don’t look at me!” Barry told us, tilting back like he might if he had hands to throw in the air.
“I wasn’t gonna, so don’t worry,” I said. “But you did good getting us up here.”
“So how do we get down?” he asked.
I took another drag of my cigarette. “I’m workin’ on it.”
The sirens would be coming soon, either cops or the fire department or both, but this was only the beginning of our trouble. For now all I could hear were the sounds of the city, and somewhere underneath it all I swear I could still hear the piano playing.