Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Read Free Page B

the city had gone back in time to the seventies and eighties.
    On the way over tonight he’d passed car after car with “No Radio” signs in the windows. Every street was flanked with them. A symptom of the city-dwellers’ response to the predators. With failing faith in City Hall’s ability to make the streets safe, they retreated. When they parked their cars they removed their satellite units and took them into the steel-doored, barred-windowed fortresses they called home. One more piece of ground surrendered. They’d pulled all their belongings in from the street; after having shrubs and small trees repeatedly dug up and carted off from the fronts of their apartment houses, they’d stopped planting them, and they’d chained— chained —the trunks of the few larger ones that remained.
    The Taint was taking over.
    It all sickened Jack. He’d had it up to here with watching the good folks retreat. But maybe it served them right. They’d allowed themselves to be disarmed, surrendered all responsibility for their own safety until they’d been reduced to rabbits cowering in their burrows, praying the wolves wouldn’t find them.
    Jack sighed and sipped.
    “Is this seat taken?”
    Startled, Jack looked up and saw Glaeken standing across the table, one big hand holding his cane, the other resting on the back of a chair.
    “How do you do that?”
    The man could slip through a room like a ghost.
    “Years of practice.”
    Years … right. More like millennia.
    Julio ambled over, wiping his hands on a towel.
    “Hey, G. The usual?”
    “If you’d be so kind.”
    “Comin’ up, meng.”
    “Make that two,” Jack said.
    Glaeken sniffed the air as he watched the muscular little man hustle back to the bar.
    “I do believe he’s managed to find a cologne worse than the last.”
    Jack nodded. “I think this one’s Eau du Wet Stray Dog.”
    The old man looked older than ever as he dropped into the chair and stared at the tabletop.
    “Something wrong?”
    Glaeken looked up. “Wrong? Of course there’s something wrong. Have you been in a cave all day?”
    The snapping tone was uncharacteristic. Glaeken upset … not good. He never got upset.
    “Let’s pretend that’s just where I’ve been. What’s up?”
    “The sun rose five minutes late this morning and set ten minutes early tonight.”
    The words hit him like a bucket of ice water.
    It will begin in the heavens.
    Rasalom’s warning back in March.
    March … the horror of that night in Glaeken’s apartment. Weezy, Eddie, the Lady …
    “Oh, hell.”
    “Exactly: Hell. How could you not have heard?”
    Jack had glanced through Abe’s newspapers at the shop this morning and spent the rest of the day setting up a fix over in Brooklyn.
    “Guess it happened too late for the morning papers and I’m not much for radio and TV.”
    “It’s all everybody’s talking about.”
    Jack gestured to the crowd of Julio’s regulars, yakking and yukking it up like any other night.
    “Not here.”
    “This place has its own consensual reality. It doesn’t count. But you know now, and I think you know what it means.”
    Jack nodded, feeling a little sick. “He’s started his final moves, his end game.”
    “Yes, the Change…”
    Why now, damn it? This conflict had been running for ages. Why did the final showdown have to come at a time when Gia and Vicky would be caught in the fray?
    Julio returned with two pints of John Courage. He’d put it on tap for Jack a few years ago. Jack had moved on to other brews but Courage Amber had become such a hit with the regulars that Julio kept it running with privately imported kegs.
    Glaeken lifted the glass with a big, scarred hand, quaffed about a quarter of its contents in one gulp, then loosed an appreciative burp.
    “Not as good as when they first made it back in oh-two, but still tasty.”
    Jack knew he meant 19 02. He leaned forward. “What are our options?”
    Glaeken sighed. “I’d hoped not to live to see this